Chinese Routemaster

[TomC]

US transit buses are very expensive because most are now Natural Gas.  At least in the Freightliner truck side, the Natural Gas option adds about $45,000 to the price.  Not even mentioning all the safety features that also add $$$. Good Luck, TomC

[belfert]

I thought a lot of transit agencies were going away from natural gas due to issues with the engines?  I know the local transit agency is still using diesel.  The buses cost about $400,000 for straight diesel and about $600,000 for the hybrids they have been buying some of recently.

[seaton@mta]

Tom,

CNG or hybrid electric these days, though clean diesel is making a comeback. 

Also, there are few manufacturers who build transit buses.  Daimler announced yesterday that they will no longer manufacture Orion transit buses. 

Buses have gotten a lot more expensive over the years.  In 1963 New York City ordered about 800 GM New Looks -- TDH 5303s at $38,000 each.

-- Seaton

[garhawk]

My gob has been smacked!

Whatsatmean?

[Oonrahnjay]

My gob has been smacked!   Whatsatmean? 

      A "gob" is a (not so) Propah English term for a mouth.  I supposed being "gob smacked" is being stunned as if you'd been hit in the mouth but it always seemed to me to be describing hit so hard upside the head that your mouth is hanging open.  Anyway, if somebody in England says he's "gobsmacked", he's pretty much stunned and amazed.

      (Jeremy - is it a Midlands or Nawthunn term?  I think I've heard it more there but maybe it's pretty widespread.  I *have* been told by more than one woman to "shet yeh gob!!!")

[Jeremy]

From http://www.worldwidewords.org:-


Gobsmacked

You're most likely to come across this mainly British slang term as the adjective gobsmacked; your gobsmack and another form, gobstruck, are less common.

Gobsmacked combines the northern English and Scottish slang term gob, mouth, with the verb smack. It suggests the speaker is utterly astonished or astounded. It's much stronger than just being surprised; it's used for something that leaves you speechless, or otherwise stops you dead in your tracks. It suggests that something is as surprising as being suddenly hit in the face.

Though the trail of written evidence was until recently believed to date only from the early 1980s, we knew it went back a lot further in the spoken language. A report in the Guardian in February 1985, relating an encounter with the famous footballer Sir Stanley Matthews, implied that it was even then 40 years old. This is supported by a recent find:

I'm so amazed that only the Malderbury dialect can express my condition: "I'm properly gob-smacked".

A Woman of Bangkok, by Jack Reynolds, 1959. A version of the text was published in 1956 as A Sort of Beauty. There's no such place as Malderbury.

Gobsmacked, like gob itself, comes from northern English and southern Scottish dialects. One reason why it starts to appear in print in the 1980s it that it was used by the writers of gritty television series set in northern cities, such as Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff, about five Liverpudlian tarmac layers, and Coronation Street, set in a fictional suburb of Manchester (Jeffrey Miller included it in his glossary Street Talk — The Language of Coronation Street in 1986).

It was taken up shortly afterwards by broadsheet newspapers such as The Times, the Sunday Times and the Independent as well as the Guardian and by politicians who used it to display their demotic credentials. It has since travelled widely. William Safire commented in The New York Times in 2004 that the "locution is sweeping the English world". The success of the Scottish singer Susan Boyle in BBC television's Britain's Got Talent in 2009 led to a further boost, since she used it copiously in interviews.

It's an obvious derivation of an existing term, since gob has been a dialect and slang term for the mouth for four hundred years (often in insulting phrases like shut your gob! to tell somebody to be quiet). It possibly goes back to a Scottish Gaelic word meaning a beak or a mouth, which has also bequeathed us the verb to gob, meaning to spit. Another form of the word is gab, from which we get gift of the gab.