Egads! Current glut of gobsmacking is flabbergasting
Words are my business and in 50-plus years of writing I’d estimate I’ve used dozens of them, some more than once. But this is the first time I’ve ever had the opportunity to use “gobsmacked.” Which proves once again how unhip I am, because it’s a very trendy word. In the last week or so alone:
■ Brad Pitt said, “I’m a bit gobsmacked to tell the truth,” after he won an Oscar last Sunday.
■ The Los Angeles Times reported on Monday that the director of the Oscar-winning movie “Parasite” was “still gobsmacked” when he arrived backstage at the end of the Academy Awards telecast.
■ USA Today reported on Tuesday that “automotive industry insiders were gobsmacked” by the latest Tesla truck design.
■ When a woman in
North Carolina learned this week that her husband of 35 years was an escaped criminal, actress Jennifer Garner declared that the wife “must be gobsmacked.”
Gobsmacked isn’t a new word. It’s of ScotchEnglish derivation and is a combination of “gob,” which means “mouth” and “smacked,” which means “smacked.” It’s synonymous to “flabbergasted,” “amazed” or “astounded” and has been around since the 1800s.
And recycling old English words isn’t new, either. Joe Biden, for instance, adopted “No malarkey!” for the side of his campaign bus. Judging by the results, maybe he should have gone with “No poppycock!”
Gobsmacked isn’t the only word I haven’t gotten around to using. “Fraught” is another one, although it’s been used a lot lately. Or, rather, misused. Traditionally, fraught meant “filled with” and was only the beginning of a phrase. But currently a lot of publications merely use “fraught,” leaving it up to their readers to figure out with what the topic was fraught. Fraught with peril? Fraught with anticipation? Fraught with jelly beans?
And a few years ago you couldn’t read a newspaper or magazine article without coming across the word “paradigm,” but I never used it because I couldn’t figure out exactly what it meant.
In case you were wondering, the last estimate I could find for the number of words or phrases in the English language was 1,057,379 (Shakespeare reportedly was responsible for 17,000 of them). But it’s estimated that there’s a new word added to the English language every 98 minutes. Which means I’m going to have to stop lollygagging and start writing a lot faster if I want to use them all before I retire.
Maybe I’ll start with “codswallop,” which is not related to gobsmacked, even though it’s also British and equally funny-sounding. It means “foolish” or “untrue,” so perhaps President Trump might want to tweet it as an alternative to “fake,” “hoax” or “witch-hunt.”
Although, if he did, I’d definitely be gobsmacked.