Word of the Day
: July 29, 2011slaphappy
playWhat It Means
1 : dazed and confused : punch-drunk
2 : buoyantly or recklessly carefree or foolish : happy-go-lucky
slaphappy in Context
The students were all a little slaphappy after pulling an all-nighter to finish their group project by morning.
"Leslie Nielsen, the straight-faced comic, was the master of the one-line joke. As the less-than-suave Lt. Frank Drebin or the slap-happy doctor in 'Airplane,' Nielsen used his droll wordplay to become one of the most memorable comics of all time." -- From a blog post by Melissa Bell on WashingonPost.com, November 29, 2010
Did You Know?
"Slaphappy" hits a lot of the same spots as "punch-drunk": when you suffer a blow to the head, you become confused and silly for a while. The "dazed and confused" sense of "slaphappy" first appeared in English in 1936, and by the following year it was being used to describe those who behave with such abandon it’s as though they’ve had the common sense knocked out of them. A 1937 article in the New York Herald Tribune called Ernest Hemingway, a writer known to have had an adventurous lifestyle, "the slaphappy litterateur." Often you will see the word spelled with a hyphen ("slap-happy"), but the closed compound is more common.
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Test Your Memory
What word completes this sentence from a recent Word of the Day piece: "There was much ____________ in the tabloids over the young actress’s sudden marriage to the much older entertainment mogul"? The answer is ...
