Voters ask themselves: ‘what is a shellacking?’

It was the defining word of these elections, and it sounds rather violent. Yet even after they inflicted one on the Labour Party, according to Joan Burton, many voters may be asking themselves: what exactly is a "shellacking"?

In fact, in its original meaning, the word has no violent undertones. It refers to an old-fashioned varnishing process, using resin, which is now mainly reserved for “high-quality antiques”.

Apt as that last term might seem for the current Labour leadership, it’s hardly what Ms Burton had in mind. More likely, she was thinking of shellacking’s slang sense, first used in US criminal circles, in which it means “a bad beating”.

As such, according to Webster's Dictionary, it first appeared in print in 1931. A year later, it made its Irish Times debut, via a story from New York in which police used it as a euphemism for the treatment given to a prisoner who died in their custody.

Like another Americanism, the Yiddish shemozzle, “shellacking” has since achieved currency in Irish sport, especially Gaelic Games and rugby. There, it tends to be reserved for defeats that are worse than hammerings, but not quite as bad as massacres.

Among recent shellackings reported in this newspaper, for example, was Dublin's 17-point defeat to Kerry in the 2009 All-Ireland Quarter Finals. Labour may take comfort from the fact that, two years later, Dublin were champions: with a much-changed team, it's true, but – crucially for Eamon Gilmore – under the same management. As he attempts to calm the shellac-shocked troops, however, Ms Burton was probably thinking more about Barack Obama, who also used the word to describe the Democrats' mid-term election debacle of 2010.

That result was widely expected to translate into defeat in the 2012 presidential race. It didn’t. Optimistic Labour Party members will hope their shellacking wears off as quickly.