• slobber •
Pronunciation: slah-bêr • Hear it!
Part of Speech: Verb
Meaning: 1. To drool, slaver, drivel, to allow saliva to escape the mouth. 2. To eat messily, noisily, in a greedy way. 3. To cry excessively. 4. To smear or daub carelessly, messily.
Notes: I grew up with today's word in North Carolina but haven't heard it up north in Pennsylvania since settling here in 1965. It comes with a verb, beslobber "to wet with slobber", and a personal noun, slobberer. The adjective is slobbery "having a tendency to slobber, wet with slobber". The noun itself has been used as an adjective meaning "clumsy, awkward".
In Play: The basic sense of this word has to do with saliva: "Marshall had to wipe the microphone because the previous singer had slobbered all over it." However, it can refer to depositing any kind of liquid: "Miranda's new painting looks as if she had just slobbered different colors on the canvas."
Word History: Today's Good Word is a mispronunciation of slaver "to drool", a verb (mis)derived from saliva, semantically distinct from salivate "to produce abundant saliva". Slaver started as a mispronunciation known as "overcompensation". People down South and in Boston were self-conscious about their dialect, specifically about the loss of Rs at the ends of words. But they didn't know which words ending on the uh-sound (schwa) needed Rs and which ones didn't. So, they overcompensated, pronouncing Cuba as Cuber, Eva as Eever, and saliva as saliver, which metathesized into slaver. Latin created its word saliva from PIE sal- "dirty gray, saliva, willow", source also of Latin salix "willow", Albanian shelg "willow", Irish salach "dirty", Welsh salw "drab, ugly", Dutch slobberen "to slurp", English sallow, and Swedish sörpla "slurp, drink noisily".
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