Gibbeting--though it hits the ear like a word for happy playground chatter or perhaps, at worst, the cleaning of small game birds--is in fact a ghastly verb. To gibbet is to dip a corpse in tar and suspend it in a flat iron cage (the gibbet) in plain view of townsfolk while it rots and gets pecked apart by crows. A stroll through the square must have been a whole different plate of tamales back then.