>>>>Just like they have "subpoenaed" a witness... what, "underpunished"? Because "sub poena" means literally that, "under punishment".
>>>
>>>Ah, but I guess the implication is; "Come and be a witness - under punishment of imprisonment if you fail"
>>
>>That surely is the implication, but they made "under punishment" a transitive verb :).
>
>I dig that in English though. Like "This process will take too long so I'll over-night it", or "Just for once I'd like to eat lunch in a restaurant; I'm sick of brown-bagging"

These are nice examples of the elasticity of language, and I'm sure that anybody who uses those two knows exactly what "over-night" is, or what's the meaning of brown bag. In the case of sub poena, a descriptive clause first became a noun (and that's the first disconnect from its actual meaning, now to mean "a court order to witness under [pain of] punishment"), and then a verb ("to issue a court order to witness under [pain of] punishment""). My bet is that 99% of those who use it as a verb have no clue what it actually meant... including the script writers for Lorder ;).