SUE DE GROOT | Listen up, unless it knocks you out or floors you, it’s simply not stunning

It’s that time of the year again where people lose their heads in the pursuit of spurious bargains. 

I have written before about the real meaning of Black Friday, which has nothing to do with slave markets and everything to do with weary officers of the law trying to stop shoppers drunk on the headiness of bargain-hunting from being run over by cars.

One of the Black Friday shout-outs that blared uninvited across my screen this week read: “Tips and design ideas for your Black Friday and Cyber Monday e-mail marketing. Download our Black Friday e-mail template and create stunning campaigns.”

Two of my personal bugbears in one marketing paragraph: what are the odds? 

Of all the words that truly, madly, deeply annoy me — and those three adjectives are high on the list — an abiding  front-runner is “stunning”. 

Not when it is properly used, of course. I have no problem with game rangers stunning rhinos to move them somewhere safer. I do have a problem when bombarded by stunning views, stunning designer dresses and stunning plates of micro-vegetables.

Unless a view, a dress or a plate of salad lands heavily on your head and knocks you down, it isn’t stunning at all. 

The original meaning of stun, or near enough, is to cause unconsciousness. A stunning blow is an incapacitating smack delivered with a two-by-four. That’s a heavy plank, not a car, though heavy objects of other sizes will have the same effect, as will very bad news. For anything to be properly stunning, the person should really fall down.

Stunning has been in danger since it stumbled shakily into modern English usage in around 1600. It was converted from the Middle English stonen, used in the 1200s when it was easier to get your hands on a stone than a two-by-four. Before that it belonged to the French as estoner, meaning to daze or stupefy, and even earlier it was in safe hands as a Latin word used whenever someone was floored by a loud thunderclap.

Unless a view, a dress or a plate of salad lands heavily on your head and knocks you down, it isn’t stunning at all. 

Stunning is a fighter though. Despite constant abuse by travel, fashion and food writers, not to mention PR firms, it still tries feebly to get up every time it is knocked down. There are instances when it is used correctly — by the owners of stun guns, for example.

Even when used in less frivolous circumstances, however, stunning is still treated carelessly. More than one reporter has said how stunned South Africans were by the news that a certain prophet managed to levitate to Malawi and thus escape being charged with defrauding his parishioners back at home. 

No, we were not stunned. Many were shocked, horrified and saddened, perhaps, but the only people actually stunned were those who had previously had the lying hands of the charlatan prophet laid on them and landed — by prior and possibly financially recompensed agreement — prostrate on the floor.

In a mysterious and mutable world, it would be comforting to think you could rely on the unchanging nature of words, but they are as subject to the whimsy of the times as is service on aeroplanes.

Stunning is a fighter though. Despite constant abuse by travel, fashion and food writers, not to mention PR firms, it still tries feebly to get up every time it is knocked down.

Some words are abducted by slang gangs, tortured and dumped in the desert, then given new names under a witness protection programme, and in the end no one has a clue where they came from. “Awesome” and “hectic” have suffered the same fate as stunning.

In the book I happen to be reading — Agent Sonya, the incredibly detailed and thoroughly intriguing biography of a communist spy (review to come in Sunday Times Lifestyle) — author Ben McIntyre quotes one of the best examples of the twin meanings of “stunning” I have yet seen.

According to McIntyre, a very boring British expatriate engineer, the designer of a concrete abattoir in Shanghai in the early 1930s, had his work described by the magazine Architectural Review as “an Art Deco masterpiece and one of the earliest attempts at combining stunning animals with stunning architecture”.

The cows and sheep slaughtered in this abattoir might very well have been beautiful, but this is not what is meant here. The first “stunning” is used as a verb and the second as an adjective. Mind you, if the edifice was badly built and a beam or two happened to detach themselves and fall on the heads of abattoir workers, that too might be arguable.