"comstockery" meaning in All languages combined

See comstockery on Wiktionary

Noun [English]

Etymology: Named after Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) (and the Comstock laws which he propagated) + -ery, coined in an editorial in The New York Times in 1895 and famously adopted by George Bernard Shaw in 1905. Etymology templates: {{!}} |, {{lang|en|Anthony Comstock}} Anthony Comstock, {{named-after|en|Anthony Comstock|born=1844|died=1915|wplink==}} Named after Anthony Comstock (1844–1915) Head templates: {{en-noun|-}} comstockery (uncountable)
  1. (US) Censorship of literature and performances because of especially broad definitions of obscenity or immorality. Wikipedia link: Comstock laws, George Bernard Shaw Tags: US, uncountable Synonyms: Comstockery
    Sense id: en-comstockery-en-noun-ixvc1VHj Categories (other): American English, English entries with incorrect language header

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for comstockery meaning in All languages combined (2.5kB)

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          "text": "1905, George Bernard Shaw, letter, New York Times, Sept. 26, 1905,\nComstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States."
        },
        {
          "text": "1916, H. L. Mencken, column, Baltimore Evening Sun, July, 19, 1916,\nA people unconvinced of the pervasiveness of sin, the supreme importance of moral problems, the need of harsh and inquisitorial laws--in brief, of the whole Puritan theological and political apparatus--would never have permitted the growth of such curious flowers as Comstockery, so obnoxious and so incomprehensible to all foreigners."
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          "ref": "2019 January 18, Mark Green, “Three Authors Consider Contemporary Politics, Anxiously”, in New York Times",
          "text": "Yet while chiding extreme libertarianism, [David] Selbourne veers dangerously close to Comstockery in his tsk-tsking of noise that “masquerades as music,” gender fluidity, sperm banks, bad grammar, video plagiarists and other presumed vices.",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-06-19 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-06-06 using wiktextract (372f256 and 664a3bc). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.