It’s flabbergasting how you can be metagrobolized by “flummox,” flummoxed by “metagrobolize,” and you can be both flummoxed and metagrobolized by “flabbergast.”
“Flabbergast” first appeared in the 1700s. Today it means astonished or very, very surprised, but back when it was a new word (probably created by combining“flap” and “aghast”), it also meant terrified. The key physical trait the word seems to have been aiming to encapsulate was trembling — if you were flabbergasted, you were so terrified (or astonished) that you were both aghast and trembling. “Aghast” already meant terrified; it’s from the Old English word “gaestan” (to terrify), which was reasonably enough an outgrowth of “gaest” (a ghost!).
If you’re “flummoxed,” though, you’re not scared or astonished; you’re confused or puzzled. Trying to figure out where “flummox” came from has flummoxed everyone who’s looked. It came into use in the early 1800s, and might have originated in a now-forgotten dialect somewhere in England. There’s also a less-common version: “a flummox.” That’s an attempted event or occasion that turns out to be a disaster. The Fyre Festival of 2017 was a flummox.
The best of this trio of words, I think, is “metagrobolize.” It’s the best for two reasons: because it’s flabbergastingly obscure and because it was invented by a comedian. The comedian in question was François Rabelais. He was French, and since he lived in the 1500s he’s usually called a “humorist” or “satirist.” But come on, he was that era’s version of a comedian. He first used it in 1534 in a story about a giant named “Gargantua.” The first part of the word means frivolous (in Greek), and the second part comes from “cribulum,” a Latin word meaning “a sieve” — that word seems to have been adopted into Arabic, then back in to French and Italian as “grabeler,” which was used to mean examining something closely. It later entered English as “garble” (apparently the original meaning of “garble” got garbled).
But back to “metagrobolize.” It entered English at a very specific time: 1693, when Peter Motteux used it in a version of an English translation of Rabelais’ work: “I have been these eighteen days in metagrabolising this brave speech.” And even at the time people were metagrobolized by “metagrobolize.” A footnote in Motteux’ book explained that the word meant “the studying and writing of vain things,” but a French edition explained the word as “to give a lot of trouble for nothing; to bore and annoy others.”
“Metagrobolize” shows up in Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 Stalky& Co.: “It’s the olive branch,” was Stalky’s comment. “It’s the giddy white flag, by gum! Come to think of it, we have metagrobolized ’em.”
Metagrobolize is still in use today, although infrequently. Rick Irby, who designs and builds word puzzles, supposedly decided in the 1970s to call people who work on puzzles “metagrobologists.” And on January 20, 1991, it showed up in the Sunday Star-News, a newspaper in Wilmington, NC: “Your broker is a real dipstick and slick as one too. You don’t need to have your brains metagrobolized by his inscrutable statements to know that something’s amiss.”
The whole flummox is flabbergastingly metagrobolous.
