Massive losses for the Democratic Party in this week’s US mid-term elections , mean that President Obama will have to deal with a somewhat hostile House of Representatives for the next two years (although they did manage to hold on to the Senate, and some commentators point out that it wasn't all good news for the right wing Tea Party …) I don't know why it came as such a surprise as, even from an observation point thousands of miles away across the Atlantic, that seemed to be the way it was shaping. Obama described the defeat as a shellacking, which produced a flurry of etymological debates ... Where did this unusual word come from? Again, I'm slightly mystified as to the surprise and confusion, I've seen and read this in American sports commentaries and gangster movies for years. Originally I, like most of the current crop of internet etymologists , associated it with the "shellack" varnish, in the same way that we might talk about someone getting "past...
Dialogues, monologues, sketches, poems, rants, theological and liturgical bits and bobs and miscellaneous other verbal doodles...