The downside I suppose that it might be all too easy sometimes, when you had a tiger moment, to turn round & just clobber the children with your mattenklopper.
Surprisingly the OED says that clobber, in the sense of ‘To hit; to thrash or beat up; to defeat, shoot down; to reprimand or criticize severely’ is of origin unknown.
I remember vividly arriving as a teenager on the night ferry at Oostende & being taught by a German student I had met on the boat that it is actually pretty easy to understand written Flemish/Dutch if you just relax & imagine what it sounds like – remarkably similar to English. So it seemed obvious to me that clobber comes from kloppen, but I guess not.
However, given that this excursion started with my remembering pother, a word that has associations with dust, it was charming to find that in other senses of the word clobber, such as ‘A black paste used by cobblers’ or, in the glorious form of clobberiousness, ‘The rabble, the unwashed’, there may be links with Scots/Irish words such as clabar or clabber which are translated as mud, clay or dirt.
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