Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
MULCT
The Latin word for a fine, mulcta, leapt into English as mulct (pronounced MULKT), with the same meaning. Transformed into a verb, mulct originally meant "to punish by levying a fine." But the verb has taken on an unsavory tone, meaning "to extract by fraud," "to obtain by duress or theft," usually in reference to money.
Example: Thomas Frank, in "Lie Down for America" (Harper's, April 2004): "Each of the three cases, like the larger scandals of Enron and WorldCom, involved a quasi-public utility whose leadership had taken long pulls from the bubbling bong of New Economy theory. At each one the bosses, always heralded as geniuses, had invented elaborate plans for freeing themselves from the humdrum of public service and setting out to mulct the world—and in each case these plans collapsed for all the usual, predictable reasons, while workers and customers screamed and mom and pop shareholders discovered they weren't going to retire in Hawaii after all."