Today's Word -- Gormless

So I'm reading a book (for work, naturally), and I come across this character description:

"He was a walking definition of 'gormless'".

Gormless is a word that I've vaguely encountered in the past, but I have absolutely no idea what it means, and the problem with being a "walking definition" on the page is that if you don't know the definition to begin with, you're sort of stuck.

I know the word is British, because they have lots of great words like this, that somehow inexplicably never made the crossing to America.

So I look in my big tattered dictionary (so tattered that I think it's a Webster's, though since the cover -- and cover pages -- are long gone, it's unclear what it is). It has provided lots of obscure words in the past to aid in Scrabble triple-word scores, so I figure gormless has got to be there.

Nope.

So it's on to the Internet, where you can google anything (side note: I saw two separate things on TV the other day that made a sexual joke out of the idea of "googling" something. So the joke has been made. Take it out of your script).

178,000 hits. 178,000 hits on Gormless? Yikes.

And there's the definition.

Gormless. It means "stupid or slow-witted". Which I wish I knew when I was 10, because it's a great insult that makes people actually feel a bit gormless when they look it up and realize maybe they are.

Gormlessness is a word. So is gormlessly. "Gorm", however, has disappeared into the ether. So without gorm, maybe everyone is gormless.

I'm not saying you should use obscure words like this in a screenplay; you shouldn't. But it's kind of fun to have them hanging up on the wall of your brain, ready to unsheathe if they are ever necessary for witty byplay in the real world.