Gobsmacked
Dan Leifker
before. The context was something about Alaskans being gobsmacked by
the speed of Sarah Palin's rise in the U.S. politics.
It appears that gobsmacked, meaning utterly astonished, is fixed as a
past participle. Can you use it in other tenses, something like "His
answer would gobsmack anyone"?
dleifker
tony cooper
wrote:
The word means "smacked in the mouth"; an allusion to being so
astounded that you feel you've been hit in the face. It's usually
used by or about the person being surprised, so you really wouldn't
say his answer would gobsmack someone. You'd say "Anyone would be
gobsmacked by that answer". That's the natural use.
--
Tony Cooper - Orlando, Florida
Peter Duncanson (BrE)
<dlei...@leifker.com> wrote:
If someone is familiar with "gobsmacked" they would understand
your suggested sentence.
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gob1.htm
--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)
Peter Duncanson (BrE)
<dlei...@leifker.com> wrote:
There is an example of the use of "gobsmack" meaning simply to
silence rather than to be "dumbstruck" by astonishment at:
http://www.edn.com/index.asp?layout=blog&blog_id=1470000147&blog_post_id=1970027197
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Mars weather may gobsmack Phoenix lander power system. And
maybe not.
Django Cat
While universally used, 'gobsmacked' is originally scouse.
DC
John Dean
I'll concede 'northern'.
Partridge doesn't even have it [1]. Cassell's does and, like OED, can peg it
no further back than the 80s. It's one of those words I seem to have been
hearing forever, particularly in my Manchester home.
[1] When I couldn't see it there, my flabber was gasted [2] as never before.
[2] Or my gast was flabbered, I'm never sure which.
--
John Dean
Oxford
Richard Chambers
"Dan Leifker" <dlei...@leifker.com> wrote
"Twentieth Century Words" by John Ayto (Oxford University Press) lists it as
1985, but the earliest quotation they are able to give is 1988, in the Gay
Times. "I was that gob-struck at the bare-faced cheek of the man that I
couldn't say anything coherent"
By the following year, the Daily Telegraph was in on the act. "When told the
price, between 10 and five times over-estimate, he was 'gob-smacked' ".
Because gob is at the end of one line, and smacked is at the start of the
next, I cannot tell whether the hyphen was used in 1989.
The next entry in the same book also interests me. It is "go-faster stripe"
(1985). This is a horizontal white line painted down the side of a motor
car, to give the impression of great speed capability. I remember clearly my
own first exposure to the word, when I was working in a power station. They
had just appointed a new Station Manager, whose first act (as far as anyone
could determine) was to have all four turbines and generators re-painted in
a tasteful mid-blue (electric blue, perhaps?), complete with what a
colleague described humorously as "go-faster stripes". The word has stuck
with me ever since.
Five years ago, I bought a cotton, round-necked, casual sweater. Basically,
it was a very light pastel green colour, with a dark green and orange flash
running down each arm. It looked very sporty, even when I modelled it. When
it eventually wore out, I went back to the same shop and asked if they still
sold the casual cotton sweaters with the sporty go-faster stripes down the
sleeves. The shop assistant looked at me with blank incomprehension.
Richard Chambers Leeds UK
Steve Hayes
wrote:
>Django Cat wrote:
>> While universally used, 'gobsmacked' is originally scouse.
>
>I'll concede 'northern'.
>Partridge doesn't even have it [1]. Cassell's does and, like OED, can peg it
>no further back than the 80s. It's one of those words I seem to have been
>hearing forever, particularly in my Manchester home.
Some Brummie friends went to work in the US around 1993/94 for two years, and
when I remarked on a BBS conference that it was a Brit term they hotly denied
it, and said they had never heard it before.
I suspect tyhat that was when it became whitespread, and they only discovered
it when they returned to the UK.
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
James Silverton
> Django Cat wrote:
>> On 5 Sep, 02:38, Dan Leifker <dleif...@leifker.com> wrote:
>>> I came across a delicious BrE word today: gobsmacked. Never heard
>>> it before. The context was something about Alaskans being
>>> gobsmacked by the speed of Sarah Palin's rise in the U.S.
>>> politics.
>>>
>>> It appears that gobsmacked, meaning utterly astonished, is
>>> fixed as a past participle. Can you use it in other tenses,
>>> something like "His answer would gobsmack anyone"?
>>>
>>> dleifker
>>
>> While universally used, 'gobsmacked' is originally scouse.
> I'll concede 'northern'.
> Partridge doesn't even have it [1]. Cassell's does and, like
> OED, can peg it no further back than the 80s. It's one of
> those words I seem to have been hearing forever, particularly in my
> Manchester home.
The OED's earliest reference is to the Guardian in 1985 . To tell the
truth, I thought the word was Irish but "gob" for mouth has long been
used in NE England and Scotland, particularly as part of an injunction
to close it.
--
James Silverton
Potomac, Maryland
Email, with obvious alterations: not.jim.silverton.at.verizon.not
Prai Jei
continuum:
> I suspect [that] that was when it became whitespread, and they only
> discovered it when they returned to the UK.
Um - er - sorry - whitespread?
--
ξ:) Proud to be curly
Interchange the alphabetic letter groups to reply
Robin Bignall
<pvsto...@zyx-abc.fsnet.co.uk> wrote:
>Steve Hayes set the following eddies spiralling through the space-time
>continuum:
>
>> I suspect [that] that was when it became whitespread, and they only
>> discovered it when they returned to the UK.
>
>Um - er - sorry - whitespread?
It's what people who don't like Marmite put on their toast.
--
Robin
(BrE)
Herts, England
jerry_f...@yahoo.com
wrote:
> John wrote on Fri, 5 Sep 2008 17:36:53 +0100:
>
>
>
> > Django Cat wrote:
> >> On 5 Sep, 02:38, Dan Leifker <dleif...@leifker.com> wrote:
> >>> I came across a delicious BrE word today:gobsmacked. Never heard
> >>> it before. The context was something about Alaskans being
> >>> politics.
>
> >>> It appears thatgobsmacked, meaning utterly astonished, is
> >>> fixed as a past participle. Can you use it in other tenses,
> >>> something like "His answer would gobsmack anyone"?
>
> >>> dleifker
>
> >> While universally used, 'gobsmacked' is originally scouse.
> > I'll concede 'northern'.
> > Partridge doesn't even have it [1]. Cassell's does and, like
> > OED, can peg it no further back than the 80s. It's one of
> > those words I seem to have been hearing forever, particularly in my
> > Manchester home.
>
> The OED's earliest reference is to the Guardian in 1985 . To tell the
> truth, I thought the word was Irish but "gob" for mouth has long been
> used in NE England and Scotland, particularly as part of an injunction
> to close it.
Here's an antedating from 1956:
"I'm so amazed that only the Malderbury dialect can express my
condition: I'm 'properly gob-smacked.'"
Jack Reynolds, /A Woman of Bangkok/, Ballantine, 1956, p. 46.
or <http://tinyurl.com/65mpr9>.
Malderbury is too small for Wikipedia, which I think means very small
indeed, but the one Google Web hit places it in Wiltshire. (There's a
Google Books hit on Malderbury, which rather than confirming its
reality is from a discussion of /A Woman of Bangkok/ from the book /
Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure/. "Examining a world of erotic
encounter between European, Asian, and Pacific people, these essays
explore how sexual practices and sexual meanings have been constructed
across cultural borders in Thailand, the Philippines, Burma/Myanmar,
Japan, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and the Polynesian islands.")
--
Jerry Friedman
--
Jerry Friedman
HVS
It's not in the gazetteer hosted by the Association of British
counties (http://www.gazetteer.co.uk/), which I've found to be
pretty comprehensive.
Perhaps it's a regionalising/fictonalising of the area around
Malmesbury?
--
Cheers, Harvey
CanEng and BrEng, indiscriminately mixed
Skitt
> jerry_f...@yahoo.com wrote
>> "James Silverton"wrote:
>>> John wrote:
>>>> Django Cat wrote:
>>>>> Dan Leifker wrote:
>>>>>> I came across a delicious BrE word today:gobsmacked. Never
>>>>>> heard it before. The context was something about Alaskans
>>>>>> being gobsmackedby the speed of Sarah Palin's rise in the
>>>>>> U.S. politics.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> It appears thatgobsmacked, meaning utterly astonished, is
>>>>>> fixed as a past participle. Can you use it in other tenses,
>>>>>> something like "His answer would gobsmack anyone"?
>>>>>
Strangely enough, I have known "gobsmacked" for a long time. I have no idea
where I learned it, and I thought it was an AmE term. Maybe I picked it up
from Python or Fawlty Towers.
--
Skitt (in Hayward, California)
http://home.comcast.net/~skitt99/
Default User
> Strangely enough, I have known "gobsmacked" for a long time. I have
> no idea where I learned it, and I thought it was an AmE term. Maybe
> I picked it up from Python or Fawlty Towers.
I don't recall when I first heard it, but I've heard it a lot over the
past few years. It's a favorite expression of Gordon Ramsay, along with
"shite" and "fu(bleep)". The bleep is provided provided by BBC America
or Fox, not actually said by Mr. Ramsay.
Brian
--
If televison's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who
won't shut up.
-- Dorothy Gambrell (http://catandgirl.com)
Chris Malcolm
> On Sep 5, 1:23?pm, "James Silverton" <not.jim.silver...@verizon.net>
> wrote:
>> ?John ?wrote ?on Fri, 5 Sep 2008 17:36:53 +0100:
>> > Django Cat wrote:
>> >> On 5 Sep, 02:38, Dan Leifker <dleif...@leifker.com> wrote:
>> >>> I came across a delicious BrE word today:gobsmacked. Never heard
>> >>> it before. The context was something about Alaskans being
>> >>>gobsmackedby the speed of Sarah Palin's rise in the U.S.
>> >>> politics.
>>
>> >>> It appears thatgobsmacked, meaning utterly astonished, is
>> >>> fixed as a past participle. Can you use it in other tenses,
>> >>> something like "His answer would gobsmack anyone"?
>> >> While universally used, 'gobsmacked' is originally scouse.
>> > I'll concede 'northern'.
>> > Partridge doesn't even have it [1]. Cassell's does and, like
>> > OED, can peg it no further back than the 80s. It's one of
>> > those words I seem to have been hearing forever, particularly in my
>> > Manchester home.
>>
>> The OED's earliest reference is to the Guardian in 1985 . To tell the
>> truth, I thought the word was Irish but "gob" for mouth has long been
>> used in NE England and Scotland, particularly as part of an injunction
>> to close it.
> Here's an antedating from 1956:
> "I'm so amazed that only the Malderbury dialect can express my
> condition: I'm 'properly gob-smacked.'"
> Jack Reynolds, /A Woman of Bangkok/, Ballantine, 1956, p. 46.
> or <http://tinyurl.com/65mpr9>.
That accords more with my (Scottish) experience, my ancient memory
suggesting that "gobsmacked" and "want a smack in the gob?" were
current in school playgrounds of that time, as were gobstoppers, giant
round <ahem> candies so large that when put in the mouth you were
rendered speechless until you had sucked a lot of it away. They cost a
penny, or possibly tuppence.
I suspect the 1980s was when gobsmacking rose from local spoken
dialect to being a quaint regionalism fashionable enough to print.
--
Chris Malcolm c...@infirmatics.ed.ac.uk DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]
John Holmes
> Django Cat wrote:
>> On 5 Sep, 02:38, Dan Leifker <dleif...@leifker.com> wrote:
>>> I came across a delicious BrE word today: gobsmacked. Never heard it
>>> before. The context was something about Alaskans being gobsmacked by
>>> the speed of Sarah Palin's rise in the U.S. politics.
>>>
>>> It appears that gobsmacked, meaning utterly astonished, is fixed as
>>> a past participle. Can you use it in other tenses, something like
>>> "His answer would gobsmack anyone"?
>>
>
> I'll concede 'northern'.
> Partridge doesn't even have it [1]. Cassell's does and, like OED, can
> peg it no further back than the 80s. It's one of those words I seem
> to have been hearing forever, particularly in my Manchester home.
>
> [1] When I couldn't see it there, my flabber was gasted [2] as never
> before. [2] Or my gast was flabbered, I'm never sure which.
I don't think it is particularly regional at all. It's been common usage
in Australia for as long as I can remember. If it had a regional origin,
then it must have been a fair bit more than fifty years ago, for it to
have spread so widely.
--
Regards
John
for mail: my initials plus a u e
at tpg dot com dot au
Nick Spalding
on Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:48:45 +0100:
Or Alderbury which is 3 miles ESE of Salisbury.
--
Nick Spalding
BrE/IrE
Django Cat
> HVS wrote, in <Xns9B10E80FACB80whhv...@69.16.176.253>
> on Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:48:45 +0100:
>
>
>
>
>
Nice village. Posh. I nearly got arrested there once. I can't
imagine it having its own dialect.
DC
LFS
Well, you can't leave us on tenterhooks - for what did you nearly get
arrested?
--
Laura
(emulate St. George for email)
TsuiDF
wrote:
I first heard it in Hong Kong in the mid-1990s and assumed it was
Strine, but that's just because I heard it from an Ozzie friend
there.
cheers,
Stephanie
now in Brussels
where it's widespread among Brits
John Holmes
> HVS wrote, in <Xns9B10E80F...@69.16.176.253>
> on Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:48:45 +0100:
>
>> On 05 Sep 2008, jerry_f...@yahoo.com wrote
>>>
>>>
>>> "I'm so amazed that only the Malderbury dialect can express my
>>> condition: I'm 'properly gob-smacked.'"
>>>
>>> Jack Reynolds, /A Woman of Bangkok/, Ballantine, 1956, p. 46.
>>>
>>> http://books.google.com/books?id=wqMqAAAAMAAJ&q=%22gob+smacked%22
>>> +date:0-1985&dq=%22gob+smacked%22+date:0-1985&lr=&as_brr=0&ei=GqT
>>> BSIWQBIa4jgH20cntDQ&pgis=1
>>>
>>> or <http://tinyurl.com/65mpr9>.
>>>
>>> Malderbury is too small for Wikipedia, which I think means very
>>> small indeed, but the one Google Web hit places it in Wiltshire.
I don't think so. It looks like a person who is M(ale) from Alderbury in
Wilts. Here's the extract from the hit:
George BROWNU22 MAlderbury, Wiltshire, England Occ:Signalman 2 Cl Robert
MOOREM21 MChertsey, Surrey, England Occ:A B Simeone SEMMUTU22 M British
Subject,
>>
>> It's not in the gazetteer hosted by the Association of British
>> counties (http://www.gazetteer.co.uk/), which I've found to be
>> pretty comprehensive.
>>
>> Perhaps it's a regionalising/fictonalising of the area around
>> Malmesbury?
>
> Or Alderbury which is 3 miles ESE of Salisbury.
It does seem to be a fictional place, and the author Jack Reynolds is
probably a pseudonym, judging by what Google Books shows from another
book which discusses the book quoted above:
or <http://tinyurl.com/6o8n5s>
Richard Chambers
> HVS wrote
>
>> Or Alderbury which is 3 miles ESE of Salisbury.
>>
> Nice village. Posh. I nearly got arrested there once. [ ... ]
I bet you were gobsmacked when that happened.
Richard Chambers Leeds UK.
jerry_f...@yahoo.com
> > on Fri, 05 Sep 2008 22:48:45 +0100:
>
>
> >>> Here's an antedating from 1956:
>
> >>> "I'm so amazed that only the Malderbury dialect can express my
> >>> condition: I'm 'properly gob-smacked.'"
>
> >>> Jack Reynolds, /A Woman of Bangkok/, Ballantine, 1956, p. 46.
>
> >>>http://books.google.com/books?id=wqMqAAAAMAAJ&q=%22gob+smacked%22
> >>> +date:0-1985&dq=%22gob+smacked%22+date:0-1985&lr=&as_brr=0&ei=GqT
> >>> BSIWQBIa4jgH20cntDQ&pgis=1
>
> >>> or <http://tinyurl.com/65mpr9>.
>
> >>> Malderbury is too small for Wikipedia, which I think means very
> >>> small indeed, but the one Google Web hit places it in Wiltshire.
>
> I don't think so. It looks like a person who is M(ale) from Alderbury in
> Wilts. Here's the extract from the hit:
>
> George BROWNU22 MAlderbury, Wiltshire, England Occ:Signalman 2 Cl Robert
> MOOREM21 MChertsey, Surrey, England Occ:A B Simeone SEMMUTU22 M British
> Subject,
Thanks, that makes more sense.
...
> It does seem to be a fictional place, and the author Jack Reynolds is
> probably a pseudonym, judging by what Google Books shows from another
> book which discusses the book quoted above:
>
> http://books.google.com.au/books?id=zi0IkUqc_dUC&pg=PA157&lpg=PA157&d...
>
> or <http://tinyurl.com/6o8n5s>
Ah. Under "other editions" at GB, there are some by Jack Jones. Are
they both pseudonyms?
People at
http://www.thaivisa.com/forum/Jack-Reynolds-woman-Bangkok-t6609.html
suggested that the writing suggests a skilled novelist and that such a
person might have chosen a pseudonym for a book in which a prostitute
figures so prominently.
--
Jerry Friedman
Richard Bollard
<richard.cham...@ntlworld.net> wrote:
[...]
>"Twentieth Century Words" by John Ayto (Oxford University Press) lists it as
>1985, but the earliest quotation they are able to give is 1988, in the Gay
>Times. "I was that gob-struck at the bare-faced cheek of the man that I
>couldn't say anything coherent"
>By the following year, the Daily Telegraph was in on the act. "When told the
>price, between 10 and five times over-estimate, he was 'gob-smacked' ".
>Because gob is at the end of one line, and smacked is at the start of the
>next, I cannot tell whether the hyphen was used in 1989.
>
>The next entry in the same book also interests me. It is "go-faster stripe"
>(1985). This is a horizontal white line painted down the side of a motor
>car, to give the impression of great speed capability. I remember clearly my
>own first exposure to the word, when I was working in a power station. They
>had just appointed a new Station Manager, whose first act (as far as anyone
>could determine) was to have all four turbines and generators re-painted in
>a tasteful mid-blue (electric blue, perhaps?), complete with what a
>colleague described humorously as "go-faster stripes". The word has stuck
>with me ever since.
Earlier known as "speed stripe" My first encounter in print was a book
"My Love Had a Black Speed Stripe" by H Williams, 1973.
--
Richard Bollard
Canberra Australia
To email, I'm at AMT not spAMT.
Peter Duncanson (BrE)
Known to me as "go-faster stripe(s)" from the 1960s.
The earliest quote in the OED is:
1971 Times 1 Apr. 29/4 Three exclusive colours are
specified, with some strikingly extrovert ‘go-faster’
stripes if you want them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_faster_stripes
The first racing stripes were applied to high-performance
prototype automobiles built as racecars by Briggs Cunningham
and placed into competition as his motorsport team,
beginning in 1951.[citation needed] Cunningham racecars
usually carried two parallel blue stripes running from front
to rear in the center of the white body so that spectators
could identify the team's automobiles readily during races.
....
His tradition was soon adopted by other racing teams in many
venues. Thereafter, the use of racing stripes soon became
common in the 1960s and early 70s for both race and road
cars.
....
The humorous term go-faster stripes is thought to have been
popularised, and most probably invented, in the Daily Mirror
comic strip, The Perishers. Go-faster stripes are popular
with boy racers. A running gag in the strip had one
character selling his slow-witted friend a series of
home-made buggies with "go-faster stripes" as a feature.
jerry_f...@yahoo.com
<jerry_fried...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Sep 5, 1:23 pm, "James Silverton" <not.jim.silver...@verizon.net>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> > John wrote on Fri, 5 Sep 2008 17:36:53 +0100:
>
> > > Django Cat wrote:
> > >> While universally used, 'gobsmacked' is originally scouse.
> > > I'll concede 'northern'.
> > > Partridge doesn't even have it [1]. Cassell's does and, like
> > > OED, can peg it no further back than the 80s. It's one of
> > > those words I seem to have been hearing forever, particularly in my
> > > Manchester home.
>
> > The OED's earliest reference is to the Guardian in 1985 . To tell the
> > truth, I thought the word was Irish but "gob" for mouth has long been
> > used in NE England and Scotland, particularly as part of an injunction
> > to close it.
>
> Here's an antedating from 1956:
>
> "I'm so amazed that only the Malderbury dialect can express my
> condition: I'm 'properly gob-smacked.'"
>
> Jack Reynolds, /A Woman of Bangkok/, Ballantine, 1956, p. 46.
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=wqMqAAAAMAAJ&q=%22gob+smacked%22+dat...
>
> or <http://tinyurl.com/65mpr9>.
Okay, you probably know this one, but just in case:
[Attn Jesse Sheidlower: OED antedating]
Would you rather I tried to get someone to check the on-line edition
before I attach this tag?
Apparently, as other people told me in this thread, Malderbury is
fictional. I haven't tried to figure out what dialect region it's
supposed to be in.
--
Jerry Friedman
Mike M
wrote:
> ....
> The humorous term go-faster stripes is thought to have been
> popularised, and most probably invented, in the Daily Mirror
> comic strip, The Perishers. Go-faster stripes are popular
> with boy racers. A running gag in the strip had one
> character selling his slow-witted friend a series of
> home-made buggies with "go-faster stripes" as a feature.
>
"The Perishers" was (is?) extremely good. A sort of British version of
"Peanuts", but arguably better.
Mike M
Prai Jei
Much better. My favourite character is the "poor little rich girl" who
usually turns up shortly after Marlon's birthday, though my favourite
storylines revolve around that great cosmic spectacackle (sic), the
Eyeballs in the Sky.
Mike M
Agreed. For those who are not familiar with the strip, it is
superficially like "Peanuts" in that the main characters are small
kids who converse more like adults (and there's a dog - two dogs, in
fact). But there are also occasional subplots, the "Eyeballs in the
Sky" one revolving around a bunch of crabs in a rockpool who have
evolved a complex theology (with all the predictable heresies and
schisms) based on the faces of humans who sometimes peer at them from
above.
Does it still run? (Haven't picked up The Mirror for years). I know
there were various omnibus collections, now sadly out of print (but
sometime available secondhand from Amazon resellers and the like).
Mike M
John Holmes
> On Sep 5, 3:38 pm, "jerry_fried...@yahoo.com"
> <jerry_fried...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>> The OED's earliest reference is to the Guardian in 1985 . To tell
>>> the truth, I thought the word was Irish but "gob" for mouth has
>>> long been used in NE England and Scotland, particularly as part of
>>> an injunction to close it.
>>
>> Here's an antedating from 1956:
>>
>> "I'm so amazed that only the Malderbury dialect can express my
>> condition: I'm 'properly gob-smacked.'"
>>
>> Jack Reynolds, /A Woman of Bangkok/, Ballantine, 1956, p. 46.
>>
>> http://books.google.com/books?id=wqMqAAAAMAAJ&q=%22gob+smacked%22+dat...
>>
>> or <http://tinyurl.com/65mpr9>.
>
> Okay, you probably know this one, but just in case:
>
> [Attn Jesse Sheidlower: OED antedating]
>
> Would you rather I tried to get someone to check the on-line edition
> before I attach this tag?
The 1985 Guardian citation is the oldest I can see for 'gobsmacked' in
the on-line OED, together with a 1987 citation from Melody Maker for the
back-formed verb 'gobsmack'.
Jesse Sheidlower
In general, yes, that would help. But in many cases you can tell
whether or not the OED entry is likely to have been revised;
_gobsmacked_ appeared in an Additions Series volume, and these
haven't been revised (unless the entry happens to be in the M-R
range).
This is an extremely useful cite, thank you.
Jesse Sheidlower
OED
Athel Cornish-Bowden
It's a long time since I've seen The Perishers, but when I did I
thought it was much better than Peanuts. Indeed, when I went to US in
1967 (I had seen Peanuts before, but that was when I started seeing
photocopies of Peanuts strips in everyone's office) I couldn't
understand why Peanuts was thought to be so good, probably because I
was comparing it unfavourably with The Perishers.
--
athel
jerry_f...@yahoo.com
> In article <5c44b1cd-7bee-4b00-bc49-abea7b7b9...@h60g2000hsg.googlegroups.com>,
I'm amazed. Astonished. Stunned. (Even though I know I only saved
somebody the three minutes I spent searching.)
--
Jerry Friedman
Bob Cunningham
In case no one has done this: The online _Oxford English Dictionary_
has the 1985 _Guardian_ as its earliest source of "gobsmacked", and it
has the annotation "Additions Series 1993".
A very helpful annotation that I see now and then is of the form
"Draft revision 2006".
>In general, yes, that would help. But in many cases you can tell
>whether or not the OED entry is likely to have been revised;
>_gobsmacked_ appeared in an Additions Series volume, and these
>haven't been revised (unless the entry happens to be in the M-R
>range).
I find that paragraph puzzling. In setting out to tell whether or not
an _OED_ entry is likely to have been revised, what resources am I
assumed to have? How can I tell when looking at an _OED_ entry, and
in what version of the _OED_, that something appeared in an Additions
Series volume, unless I have the Addition Series Volume available?
>This is an extremely useful cite, thank you.
>
>Jesse Sheidlower
>OED
--
Bob Cunningham, Southern California, USA. Western American English
Jesse Sheidlower
I'm referring to OED Online here.
If you look up something that appeared in an Additions Series
volume it will say so, either in the upper right hand corner,
if (as with _gobsmacked_) the entry was entirely published in
one of these volumes, or in the middle of the text, if the
item is a new sense or compound of an existing word. If an
entry was originally published in an Additions Series volume
but has since been revised (chiefly because it's in the
M-to-Ra-or-so range that's been revised), there won't be any
indication that it was originally published in the Additions
Series. (But there will be a note of the sort "Draft entry
Mar. 2008".)
Basically, if the note reads "Draft entry" with a date, you're
looking at something that's been revised. Otherwise it will
say "Second Edition 1989" or "Additions Series" with either
1993 or 1997.
So for _gobsmacked_, it's clear that this entry has not been
revised.
Once entries have been revised, they can be re-revised if
additional evidence comes in (in which case the date following
"Draft entry" will change). But we don't add antedatings to
Second Edition or Additions Series entries without revising
them, which is why people often find big antedatings of such
items--we just haven't gotten there yet.
Jesse Sheidlower
OED
Prai Jei
> (and there's a dog - two dogs, in fact).
I seem to remember three at least. Was it BH (Calcutta) Failed or Tatty
Oldbitt that you forgot?
> But there are also occasional subplots, the "Eyeballs in the
> Sky" one revolving around a bunch of crabs in a rockpool who have
> evolved a complex theology (with all the predictable heresies and
> schisms) based on the faces of humans who sometimes peer at them from
> above.
They would have had a field day with their parody of that contraption over
in Switzerland threatening once more to rend the fabric of the pooliverse.
Prai Jei
Mike M
> Mike M set the following eddies spiralling through the space-time continuum:
>
> > (and there's a dog - two dogs, in fact).
>
> I seem to remember three at least. Was it BH (Calcutta) Failed or Tatty
> Oldbitt that you forgot?
>
I was thinking about Boot and BH (Calcutta) Failed - completely forgot
about Tatty Oldbitt.
Mike M