![]() ![]() If I Name My Daughter ‘C.E.O,’ Will She Become One? - Freakonomics Blog. I remain gob smacked by todays parenting skills, attitudes, and its amazing adaptation. So what I'm saying is there were vast parts of the mine with what we call gob that had had already been caved in. verb To spit, especially to spit phlegm.įrom WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University.noun uncountable, mining Waste material in old mine workings, goaf.noun uncountable, slang Saliva or phlegm.noun countable, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, slang The mouth.noun countable A lump of soft or sticky material.noun Low A little mass or collection a small quantity a mouthful.įrom Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.In coal-mining, to pack away refuse so as to get rid of it and at the same time to help to keep the workings from caving in.įrom the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.noun A mouthful hence, a little mass or collection a dab a lump.It is used to pack the goaves, so as to support the roof. noun In coal-mining, the refuse or waste material from the workings in a mine attle.You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition. If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.īut you know what? We change lives. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. Switch con- for dumb- and you get another word that means “to make speechless with astonishment.”Ībout a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: ![]() ![]() It derives from the verb “to confound,” to surprise and completely confuse someone. Dumbstruck wears its sense on its sleeve – it means “struck dumb” or, as Merriam-Webster defines it, “made silent by astonishment.” Dumbfound is a little more complicated. It is thus considered derogatory to say “he is dumb” while it remains acceptable to say, for example, “she is blind.” Dumbstruck (1586) and dumbfound (1653), though, evolved before they took on that negative connotation. In the 19th century, this word acquired a new sense, stupid, which nowadays influences the way we interpret its earlier meaning. “Dumb” here means “incapable of speech, mute,” as it has since it was first used in Old English. You are “astounded speechless or incoherent with amazement,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it.ĭumbfound and dumbstruck make the same connection. When you are smacked in the gob, you’re going to stop gabbing (a related word). My London-born mother-in-law has been known to say “shut your gobs!” to my children, jokingly, I am sure. Gobsmacked itself is a combination of smack (“to hit”) and gob, which was originally a Northern English, Scottish, and Irish word for “mouth,” but is now used throughout the United Kingdom. In word after word, we are struck by things out of nowhere, and they rob us of our power of speech. It also encapsulates the way English often represents extreme surprise. since the 1980s, probably because it is so evocative, and so much fun to say. Gobsmacked was originally a British word but has been making inroads into the U.S. That is indeed enough to make a person stare open-mouthed in astonishment, wondering what on earth that piece of metal could be doing to make it worth so much money. A friend of mine told me recently that she was “gobsmacked” by the price of a new Apple computer monitor stand, which costs $1,000, monitor not included. ![]()
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