Barack Obama's colourful shellacking found its origins in India

By Christopher Howse
Literature
Last updated: November 4th, 2010

78rpm records may have been made of shellack (Photo: Alamy)

President Barack Obama said, “I took a shellacking,” after the bad mid-term election results for the Democrats. It sounds like something from a gangster film, as well it might, since the term is of American origin and became popular in the 1930s.

“These two bums that Lefty shellacked were members of Red Karfola’s gang,” wrote C F Coe in 1930, in his novel Gunman, which was published by Victor Gollancz in what has been called the first modern paperback format, retailing at the fairly steep price of three shillings. That was before quantitative easing.

We think of old 78rpm records as being made of shellack, though I’m not sure they really were. Shellack, a word used in English for 300 years, was originally a varnish (from French laque en écailles, “lac in thin plates”). And what was lac?

Lac was and is a kind of gum or resin exuded by a tree punctured by an insect. It was red in colour, and so in the 1550s it was called “Ye gumme of a tree wherewith silke is colored”. The word is from Hindi lakh, in ancient Sanskrit laksha.

From this gum also come our words lacquer, and, from its properties as a dye, the colour crimson lake.So Mr Obama’s language was more colourful than perhaps he knew.
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