THE MAGIC ART
For Skilled Writers Choosing the Right Word Is Insanely Important
As important as avoiding the wrong words
How do you feel when people surprise you?
Surprised, I imagine.
My kids surprised me on my birthday. So I wrote about it here. I used flabbergasted instead of ‘surprised’ to describe how I felt.
Surprise felt inadequate, tame, nonspecific.
Flabbergasted felt appropriate.
When I finished, I ran my article through my grammar checker and it underlined flabbergasted and recommended that I use an alternative.
I checked my options: astound, amaze, startle, shock, take aback, dumbfound, strike dumb, render speechless, stun, stop me in my tracks, take my breath away, confound, overwhelm.
I preferred flabbergasted.
Before looking up the definition, I pictured flabbergast as a compound of flabber and gast. I imagined flabber as meaning floppy and gast as a derivative of aghast.
Flabber only appears in the Urban Dictionary, which provides the amusing onomatopoeic definition: The way your butt cheeks flap about when you fart.
