Re. Speak, Memory

[s~Z]

gobsmacked   adjective BRITISH INFORMAL
shocked by surprise
He was gobsmacked when he heard of the redundancies.
( Cambridge International Dictionary of English )

GOBSMACKED

>From W S McCollom: "I was looking at a UK magazine and ran across
gobsmack. What can you tell me about this term?"

It's a fairly recent British slang term: the first recorded use is
only in the eighties, though verbal use must surely go back further.
The usual form is gobsmacked, though gobstruck is also found. It's a
combination of gob, mouth, and smacked. It means "utterly astonished,
astounded". It's much stronger than just being surprised; it's used
for something that leaves you speechless, or otherwise stops you dead
in your tracks. It suggests that something is as surprising as being
suddenly hit in the face. It comes from northern dialect, most
probably popularised through television programmes set in Liverpool,
where it was common. It's an obvious derivation of an existing term,
since gob, originally from Scotland and the north of England, has been
a dialect and slang term for the mouth for four hundred years (often
in insulting phrases like "shut your gob!" to tell somebody to be
quiet). It possibly goes back to the Scottish Gaelic word meaning a
beak or a mouth, which has also bequeathed us the verb to gob, meaning
to spit. Another form of the word is gab, from which we get gift of
the gab.


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