shellacking

English

Etymology 1

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 November 18, “National Affairs: Vote Castings”, in Time:
  Mourned Candidate La Guardia: "What a shellacking they gave me!"
- 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.