[f. prec. sb.] a. trans. To strike or cuff with the fists. Also fig. b. intr. To fight or spar with the fists.
1650–3. Hales, Dissert. de Pace, in Phenix (1708), II. 351. This Writing will be so fisty-cuff’d by many, that I my self perhaps, were I known, should not escape Scot-free.
1833. New Monthly Mag., XXXVII. 488. A brace of judges fisticuffing on the bench.
1885. M. Pattison, Mem., 52. He would have quizzed me unmercifully, told me I was a little fool (as he did often enough), and have fisticuffed me round the room for my pains, and I should have believed that he was right.
Hence Fisticuffing vbl. sb. Also Fisticuffer, a pugilist; Fisticuffery, fighting.
1823. Maginn, in Blackw. Mag., XIV. Nov., 527. On the moral propriety of conjugal fistycuffery I had prepared some copious remarks.
1854. Hawthorne, Eng. Note-bks. (1883), II. 173. Doing away with the miscellaneous assaults and batteries, kickings, fisticuffings, ropes’-endings, marline-spikings, which the inferior officers continually perpetrate, as the only mode of keeping up anything like discipline.
1878. Jefferies, Gamekeeper at Home, 196. The keeper himself is not altogether averse to a little fisticuffing, in a straightforward kind of way, putting powder and shot on one side.
1888. E. Eggleston, The Grayson, in Century Mag., XXXV. Feb., 562/1. Every rising fisticuffer within half a hundred miles round had heard of Bob’s strength, and the more ambitious of these had felt bound to ‘dare’ him.
