Flabbergasted

Seattle

Today I wrote an email which contained the sentence "I'm simply flabbergasted" which seemed both appropriate and natural but also made me realize that I could not define "flabbergasted" except to summon up what I thought were the synonoums "stunned," "speechless" and "shocked."

But it occurs to me I'm just guessing, and so in real time--people! this is cutting edge blogging--I consult Dictionary.com which produced the following result:

flabbergasted

adj : as if struck dumb with astonishment and surprise; "a circle of policement stood dumbfounded by her denial of having seem the accident"; "the flabbergasted aldermen were speechless"; "was thunderstruck by the news of his promotion" [syn: dumbfounded, dumfounded, stupefied, thunderstruck]

So I am happy to report that I really was flabbergasted today. And no, I'm not tellin'

But the fact that "dumfounded" showed up in the definition does compel me to once again suggest that for all your freaky clothing needs you consult Paula, the mastermind behind Dumb Clothing.

Comments

[adrienne]

ok, i'm a total nerd. i looked flabbergast up in the OED:

trans. To put (a person) in such confusion that he does not for the moment know what to do or say; to astonish utterly, to confound.

Hence flabbergastation, the action of flabbergasting; the state of being flabbergasted.

[First mentioned in 1772 as a new piece of fashionable slang; possibly of dialectal origin; Moor 1823 records it as a Suffolk word, and Jamieson, Suppl. 1825, has flabrigast to gasconade, flabrigastit worn out with exertion, as used in Perthshire. The formation is unknown; it is plausibly conjectured that the word is an arbitrary invention suggested by FLABBY or FLAP and AGHAST.]