www.alphadictionary.com

• gobble •

Pronunciation: gah-bêl • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Verb

Meaning: 1. (Transitive) To eat very fast, voraciously, as to gobble up her food. 2. (Intransitive) To make the sound of a turkey.

Notes: Welcome to alphaDictionary's Thanksgiving Sale: two Good Words for the price of one! The turkey, that Thanksgiving staple of carnivores, only accidentally makes a sound resembling the word meaning "to devour", to gobble (up, down). Both words have only native English forms: gobbling refers to either activity and a gobbler is a person who eats too fast or the bird most likely to be gobbled up in the US tomorrow.

In Play: We held this word back to the season when gobbler-gobblers gobble (recently) gobbling gobblers: "Don't gobble that gobbler, Junior, it might accelerate your growth." (I suspect that these are more examples than anyone needs, so let's move on to the history of gobble.)

Word History: Gobble is based on Middle English gobben "to drink greedily", from gobbe "lump, mouthful" (gob today). Middle English picked up the word from Old French gobe "mouthful", which also went into the making of goblet. It also turned up in another Good Word, gobemouche. The turkey's gobble took its name, of course, directly from the sound that the turkey makes (onomatopoeia). Gobbledygook is a contribution of Representative Maury Maverick (1895-1954), whose grandfather gave us the word maverick. Rep. Maverick based the word gobbledygook on the behavior of turkeys back in Texas. According to him, they are ". . . always gobbledy-gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity. At the end of this gobble there is a sort of 'gook'."

Well, I'll be gobsmacked or gobstruck as the case may be!

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gob1.htm

Gulping gobbets greedily, gobstruck gobblers gander goggle-eyed.

Well, I'll be gobsmacked, or gobstruck as the case may be!

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-gob1.htm

Gulping gobbets greedily, gobstruck gobblers gander goggle-eyed.

Golly, gee, that's a nice gathering of g words.

Here's our own Dr. G Word's treatment of gobsmacked.

Thanks for the link to gobsmacked, Slava.

Going further down the gobble trial, the good Doc refers to gobemouche, a related word he treated previously. When I went to the gobemouche GWOTD, surprisingly there was no discussion of the word's origin in the Word History section, though Doc does mention French "gobe" in today's discussion. In the interest of completeness, here is a fuller discussion on gobemouche from another authority:

The French continue to use it (gobemouche), hyphenated, for the bird that we call a flycatcher, appropriately so since it is made up of gober, to swallow, and mouche, a fly. In French it also means a credulous person who accepts everything said to him as the plain truth.
Only the latter sense came over into English.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-gob3.htm

P.S. If you are not already suffering from borborygmus from too much Thanksgiving plenty, here is one more gobbet on group names for birds which includes "a rafter of turkeys."

(http://baltimorebirdclub.org/gnlist.html)

When I went to the gobemouche GWOTD, surprisingly there was no discussion of the word's origin in the Word History section...

Um, where were you looking?

Today's word is a French compound noun based on gober "to swallow" + mouche "fly", literally, a fly-swallower.

From here.

Just answered my own question. For some reason the version on the homepage differs from that in the Agora. Go figure.

All part of the worldwide Commie Conspiracy to sap our precious bodily fluids and sow discord, Slava. Let us not strain at gnats when there are camels to swallow.

To get back to the original today's Good Word, gobble:
A dear 93-year-old friend, Bubbe Joan, just last evening wished me "GobbleTov"!
Don't you love how language is fluid and inclusive and evolves?!

That"s a kick, wurdpurrson.

Indeed. Thanks. And so is Bubbe Joan, retired university librarian and everyone's favorite Jewish mother. She's feisty, generous of heart, attends the Unitarian Church to keep the lines of learning open, is a mainstay in a small Jewish community, and weighs about 89 pounds soaking wet (she also has gone river running until recently, so we know of what we speak).

Bubble Joan sounds a lot like Maude in Harold and Maude, a movie cult classic you may be familiar with, but if not, Ruth Gordon plays an eightyish and spunky Maude to Bud Cort's twentyish and morbid Harold in a quirky winter/spring romance.
You can find more about the film online at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_and_Maude

Harold and Maude has been one of my more favored films for decades. Yes, Joan has many of Maude's same qualities.
By the by, the word is bubbe, not bubble. It's a Yiddish term of endearment for a little grandmother. Although she IS a rather effervescent personality.

If you enjoy Harold and Maude, you might also be familiar with My Afternoons with Margueritte, a more recent charming little French film starring Gerrard Depardieu and Gisele Casadesus. It's not a very substantial film, but is a gentle character study of the two - very French, as only they can do. It's subtitled.

I wonder whether my slip in substituting "bubble" for "bubbe" is a real-time example of folk etymology or reanalysis? My spell checker made the same substitution, transforming an unfamiliar foreign word to a familiar word in a similar process.

Still, "bubbe" is listed in a number of online dictionaries, as a loan word from Yiddish, I gather.

Or, perhaps I just made a simple mistake. No need for the intellectual gloss.

P.S. The usage of "bubbe" has skyrocketed since the late seventies.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c ... be%3B%2Cc0

P.P.S. I will check out My Afternoons with Margueritte if I can find it here in China.

Perhaps Netflix, if you have access to it, has "Afternoons"?

Quite interesting how a common Yiddish word like bubbe has skyrocketed, as you say, in the general culture. I wonder if the increasing popularity of Jewish talents (comedians, singers, actors) since the late 1960s is relevant? When I was in Las Vegas during that time, almost every mainroom show on The Strip featured stand-up comics who were raised Orthodox. Couple that with the burgeoning television industry that gave such talent wide exposure, and obscure can become commonplace.