Why are sailors called gobs?

Answer 1

The origin is British. The late quotation anthologist James B. Simpson sent me an early usage in 1997 from Tony Banks, Britain's minister of sport at the time, ''I was completely gobsmacked,'' which I dutifully posted in this space, little realizing the expression had such a future. The Oxford Dictionary of New Words reports usages from the mid-80's, defining it as ''astounded, flabbergasted; speechless or incoherent with amazement; overawed.''

A gob has to do with the mouth. It can mean ''a mass,'' as in ''gobs of money,'' from the Old French gobe, ''mouthful.'' The Gaelic gob is ''mouth, beak.'' One sense of the verb gobble, from the same French root, is ''to eat fast and greedily.'' And when a politician says a mouthful with some degree of articulation, he is said to have the gift of gab.

Why is a sailor called a gob, which has the dialect sense of ''to spit''? Because in British nautical slang of the 19th century, coast guardsmen used to tell yarns, chew tobacco and spit out the juice. The common denominator of all this gobbledygook is the mouth.