This Week’s Fun & Fancy Word: Gobsmacked!
This Week’s Fun & Fancy Word Is:
No… gobsmacked is not a never-ending candy made by Willy Wonka. It means to be utterly astounded, astonished, overwhelmed by surprise. Like you’ve been slapped in the face. That’s how Brad Pitt described himself when he won an Academy Award.
Etymology:
Origin Of Gobsmacked
It’s chiefly British slang. And combines the noun gob (of Irish-Gaelic and Scottish-Gaelic origin, denoting the mouth) with the adjective smacked (meaning struck or slapped).
The earliest occurrence of gobsmacked indicates that the term originated in north-eastern England – Lincolnshire specifically. It first appeared in a column titled “Things we want to know,” published in the Skegness Standard on March 25th in 1925. What readers wanted to know was if the subjects of this article:
…didn’t feel a bit ‘gobsmacked’ when the discovery was made that the rest of the train had gone without them? [1]
Hopefully, the next time you feel gobsmacked it’s because of something amazingly wonderful that happens to you (like Brad Pitt’s Oscar), instead of an unpleasant set of circumstances like a train leaving you behind.
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