You may recall in President Obama’s press conference a day after the decisive and ignominious defeat of the Democrats in the mid-term election, he said, “I'm not recommending for every future President that they take a shellacking like I did last night,” had William Safire still been around, we’ll for sure read a On Language of shellacking.
I came across an article at a site of Visual Thesaurus, which can serve as a substitute for Safire’s.
shellacking comes from shellac (just like trafficking comes from traffic), which means resin for varnishing or polishing; how was it evolved to the current meaning of “a harsh or ignominious defeat”; a kind of rout and ruin defeat? There were some explanations, but it seems too stretched to be entirely convincing.
The article gives several examples used in sports defeats.
“At the end of the third round the Tiger was giving his man a thorough shellacking against the ropes.” —Indiana (Penn.) Evening Gazette, Feb. 27, 1925
As long as I live I shall never forget the beating I received at the hands of Joe Rivers... What a shellacking I got.” —Los Angeles Times, Mar. 1, 1925 ("My Hardest Fight" by Johnny Dundee, originally in Ring Magazine)
“Luque’s streak ends when Cubs shellac Reds, 2 to 1” was a headline in Hartford Courant of June 25, 1923.
Obama was not the first one used shellacking in describing a political defeat of a rout and ruin scale, as I found an entry of “took a shellacking in the fall election” in my Webster’s Third International Dictionary that was published in 1986.
Some say shellacking comes from shell (bombard) and the second syllable of –ac, is part of words such as whack, smack, and attack. It makes more sense to me, but it was apparently not the case.
I couldn’t find shellacking in Shakespeare’s plays; the Bard would have many other ways to describe it.
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