maddog

maddog (plural maddogs)

1. Alternative form of mad dog
   1. A rabid dog
      • 1880, The Louisville Medical News: A Weekly Journal of Medicine and Surgery:

        These mad-stones are in our days principally used as a supposed infallible remedy for the bite of maddogs, and naturally every application of such a stone to a dog-bite, even if the latter would have been of itself harmless, is scored as an additional victory for the stone.

      • 1914, Charles Roy Vance, A Book of Letters: Being a Few Sparks Thrown Off in Idle Moments:

        Sam Bluegum was bitten by a maddog some days ago.

      • 1992, Lewis Nordan, Music of the Swamp, →ISBN, page 43:

        I told Roy Dale and John Wesley the story of the day when I was five years old and a warning about a maddog went out through the neighborhoods.

   2. A ferocious fanatic
      • 1949, American Flint - Volume 38, page 5:

        For Unionism is Americanism ; it is the voice of America's millions of workers who showed the maddogs of the axis that the freedom of man is strong, powerful, and will never perish from the earth.

      • 1967, Jerome Charyn, Going to Jerusalem: a novel, page 149:

        As a German, you must remember how the Jewish maddogs took over Berlin.

      • 1978, Sasha Newborn, First-person intense anthology, →ISBN, page 146:

        Hijackers and other maddogs often claim higher motives; they did it for the good of the world, they did it for their children.

      • 1999, Reynolds Price, Roxanna Slade: A Novel, →ISBN, page 182:

        Either armed black men were coming to kill you, or white maddogs were tearing black children to ragged bits.

• goddam