gobsmacked

This one sounds like a pub insult, but it is really a tiny movie scene: someone gets metaphorically clouted right in the mouth and is left staring, unable to answer back. The first half, gob, began life as a word for a mouthful or lump and may go back to a Gaulish term for a beak or muzzle; the second half, smack, is the old tasting word that wandered into the world of blows, as words so often do when they leave the kitchen and enter the street. That makes gobsmacked a wonderfully physical insult-to-adjective conversion, the kind of phrase that practically spits itself out. You can hear a cousinly echo in gobbet, those little bits of chopped text or food, and in German Geschmack, where the ancient taste-root still survives in a much tidier outfit. By the mid-20th century it was especially at home in northern English speech, and later television helped fling it far beyond Liverpool and the working-class streets that gave it its punch. Say it once and you can almost feel the mouth go slack.