Gobsmacked

Every now and then, a word comes along that seems completely appropriate for the moment. This word is so perfect that it’s as though you’ve just been slapped in the mouth, leaving you with a sense of awe and wonder.

Gobsmacked is one of those words, at least to my playful ears.

It breaks down into two root words, just as it sounds: gob and smacked. Gob comes from Old Irish, and it meant a beak or a snout. Over time, this came to euphemize a human mouth, and then linguistic drift made it official, transforming euphemism into literal meaning.

Smacked is a bit more straightforward for modern English speakers. It comes from a word that meant smacked, and it still means that today. Here, Old English holds the most recent origin of the word smaccian, which basically meant to strike hard.

If you smack your lips, it sounds like little slaps are going on inside your mouth. Smakka in Old Norse meant to taste, and both this meaning and the slapping meaning seem to have combined into the taste/smack metaphor we use today.

So, gob + smack = gobsmacked.

It’s good to be gobsmacked every now and then! Every day, I write so that I can share some of that feeling with you—of wonder and awe, of being overwhelmed by fascination in the moment. Substack lets me add tags as I go along, and I’ve tagged some of the most mind-bending observations with the word “wonder.” Here they are if you want to mark them for later or something.

There are also things that are harder to share in individual pieces, things that gobsmack me in that positive sort of way on a regular basis. Every morning, I enjoy some delicious and complex coffee. I am drawn in by the subtlety of the flavors, and then I’m blown away with how good they are when they combine together.

I’m also frequently gobsmacked by music. This live performance by the band Nomeansno from 1990 hit me right across the mouth a couple weeks ago when I saw it for the first time:

This is probably impressive to me because it comes from a time when it was costly and difficult to film live shows. The technology and tools we have access to today are easy to take for granted, but I like to do my best to keep the past alive in my mind, mainly just so that I can appreciate the present for what it is.

In fact, the story of technological evolution over my own lifetime is nothing short of gobsmacking. I live with one foot in the pre-internet world, and while electricity and radio really changed the world my grandparents grew up in, the internet has changed my world even more.

When I was a kid, if you wanted to figure out just about anything about the world, you were limited to asking questions of the human beings close to you, or to reading old books. Today, instead of old books, we have access to an unimaginable wealth of information, all updated in real time, and far more up-to-date and accurate than those old books.

You’re probably complaining that there’s misinformation on the internet, and you’re not wrong! This may shock you, but there’s also always been misinformation in the printed word, sometimes deliberate and sometimes just based on sloppiness or ignorance. The key is to trust but always verify information you get anywhere, ever, before acting on it.

That process is a hundred times faster and easier than it was when I was born, and that’s exactly why I can write every day about nearly anything I’m curious about. I can verify anything I tell you, and I can double check any assumptions I might have had going in.

I remember that I had a pen-pal in Japan when I was in fifth grade, and this was absolutely riveting—to have a window into another nation, on the other side of the world? Incredible. All we had to do was wait a few weeks for the letters to arrive by ship.

Today, this article will go out to hundreds of people living in other countries, some of whom will open and read it. Some of you will probably leave me a comment!

I am gobsmacked by the community here. Over the pandemic, I found myself wanting to have more nuanced conversations than traditional social media allowed. I wanted a community of thinkers, capable of adding their own observations, but not the least bit binary in their thinking.

I can’t believe I’ve found that community here. You are amazing! Keep helping me figure these things out and learn about the world, and we can keep building this incredible space together.

Let’s tap into this amazing community now. Have you felt that sense of unexpected awe at something recently? What are the things that have really gobsmacked you lately?