12 Comments
Aug 15·edited Aug 15Liked by Andrew Smith

I actually didn't know about the origins of the "smack" part!

In Danish, "taste" is "smag," but Ukrainian gets even closer, where "taste" is "смак" ("smak").

Crazy how interconnected some things are. Gobsmacking, even!

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Almost certainly a common origin. I love it!

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Aug 15Liked by Andrew Smith

Such a fun word! I'd only heard it used publicly by people who had British accents, which makes everything (even snark) sound charming IMO, I believe they also use "brilliant" with various applications and intent. Thank you for another thought provoking piece!

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Good callout RE "brilliant." That word is very interesting too! Glad you enjoyed this one.

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Hi, Andrew, from a reader in Japan. 🙃

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Delightful! This is vastly better than a hand written pen-pal!

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This one is a BANGER Andrew! Your perspective of the past without tech and the future coming everyday is at the root of all the stuff I write. Well put.

As for the title, in my head it's Yoda's voice admonishing 'Gobsmacked you are'

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Ha! Andrew, I am going to hear Yoda using this word for the rest of the day now.

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Aug 15Liked by Andrew Smith

What a great word!

What gobsmacks me is when I think of my great-grandparents (who I was lucky enough to know). Both were born near the end of the 19th century and grew up without electricity, telephones, cars, airplanes, refrigeration, air conditioning, television, microwaves, even radio...let alone computers! They lived to watch all these things become so ubiquitous that we take it for granted now. I think about refrigeration a lot...probably the single most important convenience ever invented, both for food preservation and storage as well as comfort (as air conditioning). It gobsmacks me!

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Dang! That's incredible. The closest I got was to sit down with my grandparents, especially my grandfather, who was orphaned during the Depression. I loved that window into the past, but going back before the turn of the century is something else!

If you have the bandwidth, I wrote about exactly this through the lens of the oldest person ever to live: https://goatfury.substack.com/p/the-oldest-thing

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Aug 16Liked by Andrew Smith

Good article! Like Joe Rogan once said, if you think that people can live 80 to a hundred years, then the American Revolution was only three people ago!😂

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Warren Buffett writes about that a lot, being over 90 now. I've thought about things through that lens a great deal, and I feel like I have a solid handle on what a century looks like.

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