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âI am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could easily have come from a President McCain,â Max Boot, a journalist who served as a foreign policy adviser to John McCain, said recently of Barack Obamaâs cabinet choices. Someone else, commenting anonymously on the collapse of a prominent law firm after the arrest, in Canada, of one of the firmâs principals, said: âThis has just been a complete lightning strike. The lawyers are completely gobsmacked.ââ
âGobsmackedâ is British slang, originating in northern England and in use since about 1975, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. But you donât have to know what the term means to understand its impact. The âsmackedâ part makes it clear that someone who is âgobsmackedâ is stunned, taken completely aback, utterly astonished.
And despite what you may imagine about âgob,â itâs actually a clean term. Slang for âmouth,â the term âgobâ apparently originated in Scotland but has been used in British slang for hundreds of years. (In the United States, âgobâ mean something soft and lumpy, or is slang for a Navy sailor.) Put together, âgobsmackedâ means the feeling of having been suddenly smacked in the mouth.
âGobsmackedâ and its close cousin âgobstruckâ have appeared in U.S. publications more than two dozen times since September. The word is something new and different hereâit hasnât even made it into an American online slang dictionary yet, though an obscene âgobâ suffix hasâand so far has appeared mostly in quotes, some of them from people with British backgrounds. But the evocative term is likely to show up more and more.
At least itâs clean, even if it sounds otherwise. The same canât be said of another Britishism, âwanker,â which appears in U.S. publications more frequently than âgobsmacked.â In this case, âwankerâ means just what you think it meansâsomeone who is fond of, um, letâs say self-love, or it could mean the object of his self-love. In British slang, âwankerâ is usually applied to someone who is lazy, indolent, or contemptible, and almost always to someone who is male. But on this side of the Atlantic, it seems to be used more often to mean someone who is merely a jerk (a term originating in American slang), not a jerk-off. Itâs unclear whether the people using it here know its derivation, or would care.
British slang has, of course, been incorporated into American slang for hundreds of years, and will continue to be. While thereâs nothing un-American about using British slang, itâs important to know the derivation of the term in question to avoid unnecessary offense and to resist its use if an American audience wouldnât understand it. While nearly every American knows âthe looâ and âstiff upper lipâ and all that, itâs not safe as houses to assume the same of all British slang.
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