• sialoquent •
Printable Version Pronunciation: sai-æ-lê-kwênt • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Adjective
Meaning: (You aren't going to believe this) Spitting while talking! Sputtering saliva while speaking!
Notes: Today's Good Word has appeared in print exactly once, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and that was in Glossographia, or a dictionary interpreting such hard words as are now used by Thomas Blount, published in 1656. I don't think it was given a fair chance and I have chosen it for today's Good Word in an attempt to give it one. The adverb, of course, is sialoquently and the noun, sialoquence. Use it with care.
In Play: 
The foremost sialoquent character in American mythology is the cartoon character Daffy Duck: "Daffy Duck is so sialoquent, there isn't a dry eye in the house when he speaks." Few humans actually speak sialoquently except under extraordinary circumstances: "Frank Palaver, sialoquently sputtering as he does after a few drinks, pelted his colleagues with words and moisture, neither of which they appreciated."
Word History: Today's Good Word is a compound some wag created from Greek sialon "spittle" + Latin loquen(t)s "speaking", the present participle of loqui "to speak". Some etymologists have tried to relate sialon with German Speichel and English spit, but without a convincing explanation of what happened to the P in Greek. As for loqui, there was a Proto-Indo-European word tolkw- "speak" which ended up in Russian tolkovat' "to interpret". It is possible that the O and L underwent metathesis (switched places) in early Latin, resulting in tlokw-. Were this to have occurred, the initial T would have disappeared since Latin did not permit TL at the beginning of a word. The result would be a word spelled loqui [lokwi]. (Today's far, far-out word was suggested by Luciano Eduardo de Oliveira, who found it in a book Dr. Goodword himself is now reading: Reading the OED.)
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