President Obama recently characterized what happened in the November elections as a “shellacking” of the Democratic Party. Word Detective explains that shellac was introduced in the 17th century for use as furniture polish. The slang became a description of very drunk, badly beaten, or vanquished. The word detective proposes that those meanings “comes from the fact that shellacking is often the last step in furniture manufacture, so when someone is ‘shellacked’, he or she is absolutely, positively finished and done.”