On the fourth round of edits for my upcoming novel, I wanted to add a sentence where my protagonist expresses extreme shock at someone else's use of language:
I couldn't get a word in through all my surprise at her choice of language.
Considering "surprise" to be far too light I took a trip to my handy thesaurus and found one of my favorite words listed as a synonym: "flabbergast." But when I tried to form a "state of being" noun form by adding "-ness" to the past participle form, MS Word flagged it. Apparently, "flabbergastedness" isn't in its dictionary, and searches failed to turn up any other resource (other than Urban Dictionary) that listed the word.
So what is the proper word here? I can think of three possibilities, but they all seem so artificial:
- Flabbergastment
- Flabbergastity
- Flabbergastion
Any ideas?
Hi Pab, and welcome to the forum!
First, don't let MS Word tell you what's valid or not. It often flags perfectly legitimate words. Some MSW versions are better than others. Ultimately, you need to refer to a "real" dictionary to know for sure.
To answer your question, I believe the word you're looking for is flabbergastation. (Spell check just flagged that, so I told it to add it to my dictionary.)
Here's one link to an online source: Â http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Flabbergastation
That seemed a little odd to me. I had forgotten about "-ation" as a suffix unto itself. When I read your post it seemed like a form of the verb "to flabbergastate" (like "gestation" from "to gestate" and so on) instead.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists 'flabbergast' as a noun (as well as a verb) and gives a citation from 1831. I would like:
I couldn't get a word in through all my flabbergast at her choice of language.
better than all the other choices mentioned.
Emmett
Thanks Emmett. As I've said many times, I learn new words on this forum all the time. If the OED lists flabbergast as a noun, I'd say go with Pab. Simpler is always better, and truth be told, I was surprised to find flabbergastation online. Pab, you might have your readers scrambling for a dictionary, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.