Dictionary

skunkery en · NOUN

Etymology

From skunk + -ery.

Meanings

1. (countable) A place where skunks are raised.
   • In fact, he will take pride in his calling , and will not “whimper” when asked about his skunkery. 1906, Hunter-trader-trapper, page 29:
   • In Michigan, a skunkery promises such profits that within a generation an aristocratic family will be founded as notable as that of the Astors or the Vanderbilts. 2019, Tim Davenport, David Walters, The Selected Works of Eugene V. Debs, Vol. I: Building Solidarity on the Tracks, 1877-1892, Haymarket Books, →ISBN:
   • This is why it seems desirable to establish a skunkery close to or in a city. Even in the country the neighbors will help out. The farmers will be only too […] 2021, Hermon Basil Laymon, Fur Farming for Profit, with Especial Reference to Skunk Raising, Good Press:
2. (countable) A place, activity, or institution occupied or instituted by despicable or skunkish people.
   • 1983, John Masefield, Audrey Napier-Smith, Letters to Reyna, London : Buchan & Enright I felt that he had been murdered by the skunks in one of the skunkeries called ministries: & as I began to read for this, someone did a book on the theme […]
   • Some Perry county Democrats believed the term skunk was a fitting description for the Republican Party, so they offered the noble Democratic citizens of Alabama versus the "skunkery” as a proper epithet for the 1870 elections. 2020, Bertis D. English, Civil Wars, Civil Beings, and Civil Rights in Alabama's Black Belt, page 105:
   • a skunkery . Platforms, manifestoes, utopianisms, factional vendettas — all were trivial beside the sufferings in Flanders and on the seas, the lacerations inflicted both by the crook and the idealist. 1984, John Masefield, Peter Vansittart, John Masefield's Letters from the Front, 1915-1917, page 23:
3. (uncountable) skunkish behavior.
   • "Treachery? You meant skunkery, didn't you? " 1909 November, Lionel Josaphare, “Fictitious History of the World”, in The Overland Monthly, volume 54, number 5, page 474:
   • It is easy to be wise and cocksure 200 years after the events that I hesitate to write yet; I do not know enough, but I do know that skunks in power make him a scapegoat and murdered him for their own dirty skunkery and its results. 2004, Peter Vansittart, John Paul Jones: A Restless Spirit, page 40:
   • His chief complaint against the era of skunkery was its pettiness. 2015, Gilbert Highet, Harold Bloom, The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature, Oxford University Press, USA, →ISBN, page 461:
   • A packed jury and a judge interested in the case, is mere skunkery. 2013, Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound:
4. (uncountable) A bad smell.
   • The inflation in business, the blah in economics, the asinine instruction in literature, are all of a perfume, a whorefume, a skunkery, of one smell, of one root at bottom.· 1977, Ezra Pound, edited by Richard Smoley, First Flowering: The Best of the Harvard Advocate:

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