Ghastly

[Dr. Goodword]

• ghastly •

Pronunciation: gæs-li • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Adjective, adverb

Meaning: 1. Gruesome, horrible, extremely frightening, macabre, as 'a ghastly murder'. 2. Ghost-like, pale, pallid, deathly white, as 'ghastly skin'. 3. Extremely unpleasant, very bad or objectionable, as 'a ghastly error in judgment'.

Notes: This word is obviously related to ghost in ways explained in today's Word History. It may be used as an adjective or an adverb modifying an adjective, as 'ghastly pale', without duplicating the suffix -ly. The noun is the expectable ghastliness.

In Play: The basic sense of this word is "extremely horrible"; "War has too many ghastly aspects to ever be justified." Since it is historically related to ghost, it can also mean "ghost-like": "A few minutes in the snowy cold and her face was a ghastly shade of blue." It may also be used figuratively: "Phil Anders realized he had made a ghastly mistake making a pass at June McBride."

Word History: Old English (OE) had a verb gasten "to frighten, scare", which only survived in today's Good Word and the adjective aghast. The noun from gasten was gast "breath, spirit, angel, demon" in OE, which eventually turned into ghost. The OE meaning survived in the phrase 'Holy Ghost'. Its cousins, German Geist and Danish gejst, still mean "spirit" in both senses of the English word. The GH spelling arose in the 15th century, apparently under the influence of Flemish and Middle Dutch gheest. It seems to have evolved from PIE gheizd- "confused, shocked, frightened", source also of Sanskrit hedah "anger", Persian zešt "disgusting, ugly", and Icelandic geisa "rage, storm". In OE A was pronounced [ah], but by Modern English O shouldered that burden in some words: got, hot, pot. In Modern English the O in ghost came to be pronounced as in its name. (Paula Ward, who so enjoyed all the Halloween Good Words this year that she thought back then we might want to run today's curious Good Word.)

[Audiendus]

Meaning 3 is often used for trivial things, e.g:

I'm not going out in this ghastly rain.
What a ghastly hairstyle!
The food at the restaurant was absolutely ghastly.

[Philip Hudson]

This word seems to be onomatopoeic. Just to think of it sends a chill down my spine. As a teenager, my cousins applauded my ability to tell scary stories. It took just a few "Bloody bones and evil eyes" screeches to put them in a delightful horror. They were an easy audience to please.

[bnjtokyo]

I was reading Othello and came across a word that was new to me: "gastness"
Cassio has just been wounded and Bianca, his mistress, has just seen him carried off. Iago says to some people who have come to help
"Do you receive the gastness of her eye?" (Act V, sc 1 l. 106)

I looked in the GoodWord Dictionary and didn't find either "gast" or "gastness" but I was reminded of "ghastly" and "aghast." Of course I found "ghastly" treated here and entmonline says the "gh" spelling came into use in 1610, just a few years after Shakespeare wrote the play. Using an online searchable corpus of all of Shakespeare's works I found one other use of the "gast" spelling in King Lear (1605 or 1606):
Edmond
And when he saw my best alarumed spirits
Bold in the quarrel's right, roused to th' encounter,
Or whether gasted by the noise I made,
Full sudden he fled. (Act II sc 1 l 56-9)

I suppose that if you find the adverb "ghastly," the noun "ghastliness" or the adjective "aghast" won't serve your purpose and you need a verb you can take leaf out of your Shakespeare and use "aghasted"

[Philip Hudson]

Our friend Will the Bard added much to the English language. An author of a lesser light, Thomas Hardy, used the word "small" as a verb. When challenged, he referred to a dictionary which defined "small" as a verb. It quoted Hardy, himself, as the authority. I am thankful that I have got Hardy behind me. Why, I wonder, did I read ALL of his novels in my misspent youth? They were all just a bunch of wandering through the heather on the moors of southern England. The mention of heather brings me to the recollection of my favorite poet, Emily Dickinson, and her poem number 1052 that begins with, "I never saw a moor..." And if Dickinson is not your favorite poet, why isn't she?

[Debbymoge]

Philip, could you please give an example of SMALL used as a verb?
I frankly can't imagine how to do that.
Thanks in advance,
Debby

[Philip Hudson]

Debby, Hardy's example was: "The ship smalled into the distance." Don't blame me! I didn't say it!! A better writer said the ship was "hull down for--" and it was written by a better poet than Kipling who was on the Road to Mandalay". Please, someone, remind me of the "hull down" poet. It wasn't Lord Tennyson, the one who was crossing the Bar, although he was a first-rate poet. I have thousands of pages of poetry in my physical and computer library. They are also out there somewhere in the ether. But a mental-block bars me from the one I want. A mental block for an octogenarian could be fatal.

[Debbymoge]

Thank you. Would never have thunkit!

[bbeeton]

If I'd had to guess how "small" could be used as a verb, I would have guessed transitive, where I might use "smallified". But intransitive! Quite original ...

[Philip Hudson]

Smallify, smallified, smallification are all in the Urban Dictionary. Some may think the Urban Dictionary is predictive of what will be in other dictionaries. I do not consult it for trustworthy information, and I advise against it.

[bbeeton]

Oh, I wasn't meaning to imply that "smallify" was a formally proper verb, any more than "small". But my racket is document processing, typesetting of technical text, heavily mathematical, and when an author asks how to make an over-large table or graphic fit on a page, "smallify it" (and here's how) is quite understandable and appropriate in context.

I certainly wouldn't use it in a formal presentation.

[Philip Hudson]

bbeeton: I recall your telling what you worked [or work] at in a previous post. Some 25 years ago i had experience in similar work. Even earlier, when I wrote my master's thesis in mathematics, I remember the IBM Seclectric had various print balls. My dear wife, newly married, took on the composition task. Put on the Greek print
ball. Then put on the math symbols print ball then back to the standard text print ball.

[David Myer]

Wonderful contributions, everyone, on this one.

I shall certainly take up small as a verb and try it on my learned friends. When questioned, I will blithely refer them to Hardy.

[Slava]

Doesn't this lead to problems with the third person singular, smalls? Smalls has another meaning in British, doth it not? Skivvies, aka underwear?

[Debbymoge]

Ah, but, Slava, that would just be yet another difference between U.S. and U.K., no?
Two countries separated by a common language? (a la Churchill?)
The first one I ran into was the story of a woman at a London hotel asking to be "knocked up at 7 in the morning" in front of an aghast couple from New York.