Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 August 22

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August 22

Usage of term "Flabbergasting"

Sir, my query is in connection with the usage of the term "Flabbergasting". My friend used in the context that meant "one is talking nonsense" as in "Don't flabbergast. I understand that the word indicates "surprise". Can it be used in the context of "nonsensical talk"? Sumalsn (talk) 11:33, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

According to EO, "flabbergasting" is definitely a thing.[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:56, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

Yes, it's been a word for a long time (and EO just copies the OED entry: "First mentioned in 1772 as a new piece of fashionable slang; possibly of dialectal origin; Moor 1823 records it as a Suffolk word, and Jamieson, Suppl. 1825, has flabrigast to gasconade, flabrigastit worn out with exertion, as used in Perthshire. The formation is unknown; it is plausibly conjectured that the word is an arbitrary invention suggested by flabby adj. or flap n. and aghast adj."), but I think the question is about the variation in meaning. I haven't come across that sense before. See wikt:flabbergast. Dbfirs 12:52, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

It's also possible that Sumalsn's friend assumes that meaning because of perhaps similarly sounding words, such as babbling, jabbering, rabbling, jibber-jabber, gobbledygook, gibberish, which all relate to speaking nonsense, and which all contain vowel + "bb", and which all come across as somewhat onomatopoeic. ---Sluzzelin talk 17:22, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

"Flabbergasted" is a close relative of "gobsmacked".[2] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:38, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

Or as the late comedian Frankie Howerd used to say: “I'm flabbergasted — never has my flabber been so gasted!”. [3] Alansplodge (talk) 20:44, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

I'm a native English speaker, and their joke is written baldfacedly wrong. Flabber is the verbal element of the construction. It should be "Never has my gast been so flabbered." It's reversed like "grab-assing" or "tear-assing" or "knock-upper" are--clearly 'ass' and 'up' aren't usually verbs, but they get suffixes as if they were here. And yeah, it's a made-up word, but it feels like a combination of a hypothetical Latinate 'flab*re' and a Germanic '*gast'. The word has survived and remains in our modern vocabulary despite being lexically redundant because it's an inherently funny word due to that structural reversal and the Germanic-Latinate mixing, along with the more obvious phonetic reasons that it feels like an inherently funny word. Temerarius (talk) 20:07, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

Note that the OED's deconstruction of the word is only "plausibly conjectured". Nobody knows what was originally intended. Alansplodge (talk) 20:23, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

Changing normal word order in a sentence, for emphasis

Consider the following sentence: "This isn't new." That's how we would normally say it or write it. Sometimes, for emphasis or effect, we might say or write "New, this isn't." My question: is there a "name" for referring to this? Does the first example and/or the second example have a "name" or description in grammar (like, for example, "passive voice", "subjunctive mood", "past tense", those sorts of grammatical descriptions, etc.)? Also, does the second example -- "New, this isn't." -- require a comma or not? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 20:20, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

Try anastrophe for the use as a rhetorical device, or inversion (linguistics) for the more regular grammatical structure. --Wrongfilter (talk) 20:28, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

Wrongfilter -- "inversion" usually refers to local word-order changes within a phrase. The technical linguistics term for what Joseph A. Spadaro is talking about is "topicalization"... AnonMoos (talk) 23:07, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

Huddleston and Pullum call it not topicalization but preposing. Joseph A. Spadaro, I recommend that you acquire a copy of the authors' A student's introduction to English grammar. (Your library is sure to have a copy.) -- Hoary (talk) 03:05, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

The original example reminds me of the Star Wars character Yoda whose very similar style of speech is described as Anastrophe. Cullen³²⁸ Let's discuss it 03:26, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

The article anastrophe has no linguistics sources (and an unimpressive collection of other sources); and David Crystal doesn't bother with the term in his pretty comprehensive A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics, 6th ed. For all I know it's a legitimate term for this. However, the Wikipedia article describes it as "a figure of speech in which the normal word order of the subject, the verb, and the object is changed"; to go from "This isn't new" to "New, this isn't" involves no such change (it's instead a predicative complement that gets preposed). -- Hoary (talk) 04:58, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

Not "instead". Preposing a predicative complement is just an example of anastrophe. The OED cites an example by Henry Peacham in his Garden of Eloquence from 1577: " all Italy about I went". Peacham's definition was "a preposterous order, or a backeward setting of wordes", John Walker (lexicographer), in his Rhetorical Grammar (1785) defines: " Anastrophe, or Inversion, is a figure by which we place last, and perhaps at a great distance from the beginning of the sentence, what, according to the common order, should have been placed first." See Google Books. Dbfirs 05:30, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

Dbfirs -- from that description, anastrophe means creatively breaking the rules of ordinary grammar, whether in order to fit the poetic metre, or in search of a striking poetic effect. But people who say or write a sentence with topicalization are not usually breaking any rules of grammar -- they're following rules of grammar which allow for a topicalized sentence... AnonMoos (talk) 07:03, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

No, anastrophe is changing the usual subject, verb, object order, whether for emphasis or for some other reason. It includes bringing the object or predicate to the front for emphasis. It doesn't necessarily involve breaking any rules of grammar. A regularly-used example in modern English is "Here am I ...". Dbfirs 07:24, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

"Here am I..." is a kind of relic of old Germanic verb-second rules, which once applied more widely in English, as they still do in German (and I believe also Dutch). See article V2 word order, especially section V2 word order#Vestiges of V2 in Modern English. Again, this is not a creative breaking of rules to achieve heightened poetic effect, which is suggested by the definitions you quoted. AnonMoos (talk) 09:55, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

It was your definition that required creativity. I just use the OED definition: "Inversion, or unusual arrangement, of the words or clauses of a sentence.". How about here I am or here she is? Dbfirs 05:18, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

I would include the comma but I don't think it is required. I think the addition of the comma adds clarity. Bus stop (talk) 05:42, 24 August 2019 (UTC)