pandy bat
nounEtymology pandy + bat Perhaps also a pun on the Latin pendebat "you paid".
1
Ireland, Historical (originally) a stout leather strap reinforced internally with whalebone or even lead, and used at Jesuit schools to inflict corporal punishment on pupils by striking the palm; (latterly, sometimes) more loosely applied to any punishment bat
- The soutane sleeve swished again as the pandybat was lifted and a loud crashing sound and a fierce maddening tingling burning pain made his hand shrink together […]1916 December 29, James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, N.Y.: B[enjamin] W. Huebsch, →OCLC:
- 1930 Irish Province News, 5th Year No 3 (Irish Province of the Society of Jesus) "Obituary: Fr James Daly" All this punctuated, driven home, by loud-resounding strokes of the pandy-bat, not administered one after another quickly, but at regular intervals.
4 more examples
- 1957 Irish Province News, 32nd Year No 3 (Irish Province of the Society of Jesus) "Obituary: Fr Esmonde White (1875-1957)" While Prefect of Studies in Belvedere Junior House, he combined gentleness with severity in such perfect measure that a past pupil recalls: “He hit very hard with the pandy bat but obviously felt every bit as miserable about it as the unfortunate victim!”
- The strap seemed preferable to the cane and the pandybat.1991 March 3, Gregory Allen, “Letters: Christian Brothers”, in The Irish Times, page 11:
- Round about here it would seem to me to have become necessary to make some general statement about the Irish Christian Brothers. ... I have heard them blamed for many things. ... Blamed for the pandy-bat, as it was called in Dublin, or the leather as we called it in the North.1991, Benedict Kiely, Drink to the Bird: a Memoir, London: Methuen, →ISBN, page 69:
- The procedure was that you knocked on the door and were called in, presented the docket, watched the pandy bat (some were slim, some fat) being removed from a drawer or inside the soutane. You took your punishment on either hand, thanked the priest and withdrew. ... The pandybat was a sort of sjambok slick as a spatula that imparted sudden deadening pain, felt in the head as in either hand, turn and turn about, pain travelling through the nervous system.1995, Aidan Higgins, Donkey's Years: Memories of a Life as Story Told, London: Secker & Warburg, →ISBN, pages 140-141: