shellacking
English
Etymology 1
See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.
Verb
shellacking
- present participle and gerund of shellac
Etymology 2
From shellac + -ing. Shellac is used in floor polish; compare polishing, as in "the other boxer in the match polished the floor with me; I took quite a polishing".
Noun
shellacking (countable and uncountable, plural shellackings)
- The act or process of coating with shellac.
- (informal, US) A heavy defeat, drubbing, or beating; used particularly in sports and political contexts.
- 1929 July, The Typographical Journal, volume 75, page 49:
- The News baseball team defeated the Press-Guardian outfit, 8 to 4, in a recent game, which squares accounts for the shellacking the News received a year ago.
- 1929 The Leatherneck, vol. 12 (December, 1929), p. 21:
- Our baseball team got off to an indifferent start at the beginning of the season, but […] "Steve" Newman gave Gonzalo another shellacking that he won't forget for some time.
- 1944 Frank Marshall Davis, "Defeats of the Home Front" (news article, February 23, 1944; reprinted in Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press, University Press of Mississippi, 2009, p. 126):
- Unity and democracy are still taking a shellacking here on the home front, despite our successes in the Marshall Islands and in Italy.
- 2009, Lee Hamilton, Strengthening Congress, page 69:
- After many months of watching its public image take a shellacking as a result of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal, Congress finally started to move on lobby reform.
- 2010 Peter Baker, "What Does He Do Now?", The New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2010:
- [C]learly Obama hopes that just as Clinton recovered from his party's midterm shellacking in 1994 to win re-election two years later, so can he.
- 2010 Ben Shpigel, "Charmed Giants Take a Big First Step," The New York Times, October 28, 2010:
- Bochy was speaking for the masses, who watched a supposed duel of Cy Young award winners evolve into a full-fledged shellacking.
- 2010 November 4, Barack Obama, comments at a press conference, after his political party lost control of the House of Representatives in the mid-term elections:
- Now, I'm not recommending for every future president that they take a shellacking like I took last night.
- 2026 November 4, Linda Feldmann, “Does MAGA have a future? After anti-Trump backlash in midterms, it may not.”, in The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, Massachusetts: Christian Science Publishing Society, →ISSN, →OCLC:
- Now, with the president on his back foot after the midterm shellacking, and the GOP staring down two more years of an unrestrained Mr. Trump, the idea of getting a dozen or so Republican senators to vote to remove him from office seems less difficult to imagine.