Jan Freeman, “The Word: Hello, Gobsmacked” (Boston Globe, Apr. 26, 2009).
SOME NEW WORDS are extroverts – they want to be noticed. Just look at gobsmacked, currently in the spotlight along with Susan Boyle, the singing phenom from “Britain’s Got Talent,” and her 100 million YouTube hits. When Boyle told reporters she was “gobsmacked” at her reception, Ben Zimmer noted last week in his column at Visual Thesaurus, lookups of the word spiked sharply on Google Trends.
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