the.com/shock
the body's emergency shutdown, slamming doors on organs to save the brain
means A sudden violent jolt — physical, emotional, electrical, or medical — that disrupts the normal state of a body, mind, or system.
from From the French 'choc' and the verb 'choquer,' meaning to clash or collide, which English borrowed in the 1500s — originally describing the brutal moment two ranks of soldiers or two cavalry charges smashed into each other. The sense widened from that battlefield impact to any jarring blow, then to the electrical jolt (by the 1700s) and the medical emergency. The word for a thick mass of hair, as in 'a shock of hair,' is a separate, older root entirely and only collided with this one by coincidence.
- silent killer
- blood pressure crashes before you feel anything
- pale clue
- skin goes cold and gray as blood retreats inward
- electric origin
- named for the jolt of sudden battlefield collapse
- golden hour
- survival odds plummet without treatment within sixty minutes
- types galore
- five kinds exist, from septic to anaphylactic
september 11 attacks — new york 2001, nearly 3,000 deaths when planes hit twin towers