Flabbergasted Human

A. Unabashed Pacifist:

Rainbows don’t grow on missiles. You only find them in the heavens.

B. Unabashed Christian:

Holy One,

Every day, it seems, you spill new joy onto my path. Here a good exchange with my children, there a pleasant evening with friends. Here an opportunity with my wife, there a successful project completed. Here a meal at a restaurant I haven’t tried before, there a TV show that’s actually informative or entertaining (not mindless gossip or distraction).
Thank you for my life.
Amen

C. Un-quoting Jesus:

“Adam never had an original idea. Eve was clearly the wiser of the pair. She could even communicate with snakes.”

[It’s a shame, but He never said that – probably.]

D. Blog: Wonderful Words

Flabbergasted

To be surprised or astonished.

The British comedian Frankie Howerd used to say in mock astonishment: “I’m flabbergasted — never has my flabber been so gasted!”. That’s about as good an explanation for the origin of this word as you’re likely to get. It turns up first in print in 1772, in an article on new words in the Annual Register. The writer couples two fashionable terms: “Now we are flabbergasted and bored from morning to night”. (Bored — being wearied by something tedious — had appeared only a few years earlier.) Presumably some unsung genius had put together flabber and aghast to make one word.

The source of the first part is obscure. It might be linked to flabby, suggesting that somebody is so astonished that they shake like a jelly. It can’t be connected with flapper, in the sense of a person who fusses or panics, as some have suggested, as that sense only emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. But flabbergasted could have been an existing dialect word, as one early nineteenth-century writer claimed to have found it in Suffolk dialect and another — in the form flabrigast — in Perthshire. Further than this, nobody can go with any certainty.

[from Michael Quinlon on worldwidewords.org]