Definition of "ukase"
ukase
noun
plural ukases
An authoritative proclamation; an edict, especially decreed by a Russian czar or later ruler.
Quotations
Two years ago, the word went forth to friend and foe alike that gender applied to grammar while sex applied to people. I issued the ukase: “If you have a friend of the female sex, you are a red-blooded American boy; if you have a friend of the feminine gender, you have an unnatural attachment to a word.”
1984 August 5, William Safire, “Goodbye Sex, Hello Gender”, in The New York Times
(figuratively) Any absolutist order or arrogant proclamation
Quotations
It is a short step from discovering that the world we know is a fake or a cheat to discovering that human beings are themselves factitious: that we are robots, ‘simulacra’ (the title of one of Dick’s novels), ‘just reflex machines’, ‘repeating doomed patterns, a single pattern, over and over’ in accordance with biological or economic ukases.
2008 July, Stephen Burt, “Kick Over the Scenery”, in London Review of Books