The word "castigation" is correct and can be used in written English.
It is a noun meaning a severe scolding or criticism. Example: The financial analyst received castigation from his boss after making a careless mistake.
He was not three minutes into a castigation of Jay Carney for saying that nobody can credibly promise to reduce gas prices before he offered to debate Barack Obama anywhere, and said once again that if he became the nominee he would challenge Mr Obama to seven Lincoln-Douglass-style debates, lasting three hours each, with no moderator, just a timekeeper.
EVERY morning, Slovakia's prime minister, Vladimir Meciar, wakes to a barrage of castigation in the livelier sections of his country's press.
With the exception of a small number who claimed that the attack was a put-up job, they were virtually unanimous in their castigation.
The American administration was "deeply troubled" but fell short of outright castigation.
By steadily improving relations with Turkey and hobnobbing with Jordan's King Abdullah, Iran's rulers seem to be quietly ending its castigation of Muslim countries that do business with Israel.
"And if we say no we are doomed; the blame game is waiting for us as usual," he adds, referring to the castigation he expects in America.
They also record the writer's repeated failure to honour these rules, his attempts to formulate new ones designed to ensure obedience to old ones, and his frequent acts of self-castigation.
But so do tender mercies, extravagant and deep love, self-castigation and what turns out to have been no little wisdom.
It powerfully examines how self-acceptance and self-castigation coexist in the same person, and how easily one attitude can displace the other.
Athill's moments of self-castigation (such as in her unflinching chapter on colonialism) do not grate as they might with a less skilled and honest writer.
But the imitation of Christ takes courage, and it usually ends in the artist's self-castigation.
