The word for today is…

aghast (adjective):

: struck with terror, amazement, or horror : shocked and upset

Source : Merriam -Webster

Etymology : If you are aghast, you might look like you’ve just seen a ghost, or something similarly shocking. “Aghast” traces back to a Middle English verb, gasten, meaning “to frighten.” “Gasten” (which also gave us ghastly, meaning “terrible or frightening) comes from “gast,” a Middle English spelling of the word ghost. “Gast” also came to be used in English as a verb meaning “to scare.” That verb is now obsolete, but its spirit lives on in words spoken by the character Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear: “gasted by the noise I made, full suddenly he fled.”

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David is a retired surgeon originally from London who came to New Zealand twenty-seven years ago after being delayed in Singapore for thirteen years on leaving the UK. He was coerced into studying Latin...