Saturday January 19, 2008
quietus \kwy-EE-tuhs\, noun:1. Final discharge or acquittance, as from debt or obligation.2. Removal from activity; rest; death.3. Something that serves to suppress or quiet.
Consider a small police-blotter report from an 1875 issue of The Grant County Herald in Silver City, N[ew] M[exico]: "We learn that on Friday, Jose Garcia, who lives at the Chino copper mines, caught his wife in flagrante delicto -- we leave the reader to guess the crime -- Jose, then and there, gave her the quietus with an axe."-- Thomas Kunkel, "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Six-Shooter", New York Times, August 30, 1998