There were clamorous arguments about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of Mr. Donald Trump’s comment, “Hillary Clinton – former first lady, former U.S. senator, former secretary of state, woman got schlonged by then-senator Barack Obama in her 2008 primary run.” at a campaign stop in Michigan on December 21, 2015.
I suspect that Mr. Trump’s phrase in question “(Mrs. Clinton) got schlonged” is a malapropism of “got shellacked,” after reading the following paragraph in the article under the title of “Donald Trump’s ‘shlonged’: A linguistic investigation" in The Washington Post (December 22, 2015).
And headline writers often ransack the language for onomatopoeic synonyms for ‘defeat’ such as drub, whomp, thump, wallop, whack, trounce, clobber, smash, trample, and Obama’s own favorite, shellac (which in fact sounds a bit like shlong).
[emphasis added]
Collins English Dictionary defines “shellac” as:
verb.
- to coat or treat an article with a shellac varnish
- (U.S. slang) to defeat completely
besides the noun meaning a natural varnish.
So much for a long preamble and apart from right or wrongness of my guess, how did “shellac” come to mean “complete defeat”?
Best Answer
Shellac is a natural resin, which dissolved in alcohol results in a hard, glossy finish when dry. Since modern synthetics like polyurethane have largely replaced it, most people today, never having worked with shellac before, are no longer familiar with its characteristics or means of application.
Ben Zimmer's 2010 article on Obama's shellacking points out that the first slang use, from the 1920s, was a euphemism for "extremely drunk," suggesting an analogy from another finish in the building trades: plastered. The idea is that like plastered walls or shellacked panelling, a drunk person is "finished," i. e. completely and totally drunk. Neither Zimmer nor another author he cites, however, mentions the most salient feature shared by shellac and the soundly inebriated: they both stink of alcohol.
Zimmer traces the next slang use of shellacking to the boxing ring:
The rather fanciful rationale for this usage comes again from the notion of shellac as being a finish, with overtones of a defeated boxer being covered in shellac à la Han Solo in whatever that black gunk was.
Shellac was used most often on large surfaces — panelling, cabinetwork — and even had a number of marine uses. As the vehicle of the finish was alcohol, shellac had to be applied quickly, often using a large brush, then smoothed before the alcohol evaporated. If we still say "slap on a coat of paint," then that slapping — the sound of a loaded brush hitting a surface — would go double for shellacking, which has to be done far more quickly than with an oil- or water-based finish. An opposing sports team, a disobedient child, and apparently an incumbent president were thus liable to a series of rapid slaps like someone shellacking a boat or panelled room. In this usage, it really is the process of shellacking that gave rise to its metaphorical slang use, not, as with the 1920 drunks, some quality of shellac itself.