Tag Archives: clobber

Is clobbering a thing to take passively?

I only ask because it seems (by my corpus searches) that the most common use of the verb clobber is in the phrase get clobbered by. Which may be passive voice, if you don’t insist strictly on forms of be as the auxiliary required for the passive voice. Anyway, it’s at least notionally passive.

That’s not to say that it’s the only way clobbering occurs. Often enough the clobberer is named. But who is clobbering whom, and how? Well, phrases that turn up in the Corpus of Contemporary American English include “Clinton clobbered” and “got clobbered by Clinton” along with “the market has clobbered” and “getting clobbered by the market” and “the Cardinals clobbered” and “clobbered the Cardinals”…

In other words, politics, finance, sports, that sort of thing. Literal physical clobbering? Not so much. It may sound like clubbing a robber who’s jobbing the cupboards in a clapboard house, but it’s more like giving a legal drubbing to a lobbyist or jubilantly grabbing a fumbled football and doubling your point lead. Or, more to the point, “getting clobbered” is the experience of being the butt of such problems. If you get clobbered, you may blubber, but your body will probably rest intact.

Just as well, I suppose. Not just because physical violence is bad, but because… well, tell me what is and isn’t literal clobbering. To me, the sound of “clobber” is the sound of being punched on my head, especially on my ear (ow). But I don’t think anyone really uses it that specifically. If a parent says to a child “I’ll clobber you” (do they still say that?), it probably means whack or spank – though preferably the threat suffices and the exact act does not need to be determined. But, though personal physical assault shows up early in the use of the word, that doesn’t seem to be its origin.

By the way, before we get to that, how old would you guess this word is? When do you think it was first used?

The 1850s? Sure… if you mean the sense of ‘patch’ or ‘cobbler’s paste’. Which is not related to the verb in question; it may come from an older word for clay.

The 1870s? Yeah… if you mean the sense of ‘clothing’ (e.g., “a new suit of clobber”). Which is also not related to the verb in question; it is speculated that it may be related to German Kleider, but I don’t know if there’s any actual support for that.

The 1890s? Well, hmmm…

The thing is, the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest hit, from 1944, has to do with aerial bombardment in World War II. Shortly after that, they refer to sports, personal assault, and more war, followed by more figurative senses. Wiktionary says it showed up around 1941, possibly imitative of the sound of bombs. Merriam-Webster says circa 1942, no comment on origins. But Green’s Dictionary of Slang has an 1894 citation from Australia, “The larrikin / So full of sin, / has now no fear of getting clobbert,” plus an 1892 quote from a barrack-room ballad by Kipling, “An a’ woman comes and clobs ’im from be’ind.”

So that’s the trouble: we don’t really know for sure. Our research efforts have bombed, or at least they have bombs. But, really, no one is clamouring to discover the origin. When one gets mobbed by bumptious problems, etymology is not job one.

Ever been hit on the ear? It sounds sort of like this word. (The word may even look like a promised clobbering: the c, holding the l as a club, sneaking up on the two b‘s from behind to beat them…) But of course there are many other words that sound sort of like this word, too: blubber, slobber, clubber, clapboard (pronounced the “old” way), lobster, glibber… Certainly the opening consonant makes some difference: the s in slobber is sloppy while the c in clobber is more percussive. It’s that opening stop that keeps this word from sounding flabby. And the spread of the voicelessness onto the l as we say it could be said to give a sense of motion. Naturally, it sounds rather akin to club, too. Perhaps that’s why, somewhere apparently in the 1940s, this word started being used to refer to beating, defeating, et cetera (bomber pilots seem to have used it first). Before that time clobber had been a word more associated with shoes and clothing: the verb referred to patching up and cobbling, and subsequently to adding enamelled decoration; it in turn may have come from a noun clobber that meant a paste used by cobblers to fill cracks in shoes. Another noun clobber was slang for clothes. All of these showed up in the 19th century, and the clothing one, at least, can still be seen rarely today. And lexicographers aren’t sure where any of them came from. Not the current sense either. Hm!