phrases, sayings, idioms and expressions at

Shock-headed

Posted by Smokey Stover on November 25, 2004

In Reply to: Shock-headed posted by Lotg on November 25, 2004

: : : : : : : : "On it[balcony] sat a shock-haired young man gazing upward with a bold, urgent look..." from The Master and Margarita

: : : : : : : : Has anyone heard this expression before? What does it mean? My guess would be shock-haired = white.

: : : : : : : My intrepretation would be a wild haired person with hair sticking out in all directions (similar to the pictures of people connected to a static machine with their hair standing straight out).

: : : : : : I picture a mop of thick hair. On an old episode of The Simpsons, Homer caught a big fish in a lake and either let it go or lost it. Anyway, the legend grew until Homer was described as having, among other heroic physical attributes, "...a shock of hair-- red, like the fires o' hell".

: : : : : I think the original image meant to be conjured up by "shock-haired" is agricultural rather than electrical. That is, the hair is standing on end and disordered like a shock of wheat.

: : : : I immediately thought of shocks of grain when I read the subject line. I thought of color as much as arrangement.

: : : Albert Einstein leapt to my mind.

: : Found this on dictionary.com

: : shock-headed
: : \Shock"-head`ed\, a. Having a thick and bushy head of hair.
: : Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.

: : shock-headed
: : adj : having a shock (or untidy mass) of hair; "shock-headed teenagers"
: : Source: WordNet ® 2.0, © 2003 Princeton University

: I agree with ESC. It's not unusual here to describe someone as having a shock of hair - indicating they have lots of thick hair.

I don't know what author Platypus is quoting, but my guess is that he (the author) is not familiar with the normal usage of shock in regard to hair. I have often heard of shocks of hair, meaning clumps or masses, and I don't doubt that ultimately that usage comes from the clumping of sheaves of wheat or bundles of corn into shocks. You can still see this type of agriculture practiced in several parts of Pennsylvania, and on demonstration farms elsewhere. As for the notion that the hair is spiky as though it were suffering from electrical shock, like Clay Aiken's hair, perhaps. Who can read the author's mind? But shocks of hair are just thick clumps. I'm not even sure they have to be thick. I don't know, but I suspect that the use of "shock-headed" is not very common. At least, I've never heard it, never read it (except on this site). It's not, in my mind, a very useful word if it gives different readers different ideas of what it might mean. SS

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