quartered

Looking back on White’s original 500-word essay, trying to pinpoint the source of the internet’s ire, you might think you missed a line in which she insisted that all musicians be drawn and quartered.

Carrying a teddy bear and sporting a genial smile, he nevertheless can have a man drawn and quartered and order dogs to be set upon a hapless victim being dragged to death behind a motorcycle.

Perhaps they hoped that by allowing Daszak to be drawn and quartered, they might persuade the Republicans to climb down from their evidence-free claims about government complicity in the pandemic’s origins.

For twenty-first century readers, to be drawn and quartered is a particularly gruesome manner of death.

Even casting the monarch’s horoscope was treasonous, and treason’s death sentence was hideous: women were burned alive, men were hanged, drawn, and quartered — hanged until almost dead, eviscerated while still alive, then chopped into pieces.