"Cruel and Unusual"

On Friday, I was playing board games with my Friday night group, and we had a couple of kids who were the hosts' relatives there.  One of these kids was, I guess, about 12, and an OK gamer.  But he had a trademark phrase: any time someone did something in the game that he didn't like, he would say "you are cruel and unusual."  The cognitive dissonance this caused made it moderately funny (although a bit less so after several repetitions).  But it bubbled up out of my subconscious this evening that his misapplying the notion of cruel and unusual to anything he didn't like strikes me as awfully similar to the way we treat convicted criminals today.  Any time they find anything unpleasant about their incarceration or other punishment, they yell "cruel and unusual!", and most of the time, it seems like the courts listen.

( some fatigue-induced ranting.  read at yer own risk. )