The dictionary of Oxford English, so widely considered authoritative on a number of lexicographical matters, contains no entry for the verb "gob" in the meaning illustrated by such phrases as And every Sunday she lays an egg for my breakfast. I wake up in the morning and find it in my bed. A long green egg. Which I gob.
, that is, to consume by placing first in the gob (n) and then in the gullet. (Via the gob; not, that is, having first been extracted thence and placed in the gullet by some other route.) It also claims that "gobble" in the consumption, not the turkey, sense is "Of obscure origin; prob. a vague formation on GOB n.1 or n.2, with suggestion of the sound made by noisy swallowing".
Surely these are related! For if one acknowledged the existence of the gob-verb, what would be more natural than to look on the gobble-verb as a frequentative formed on its basis according to a once-productive but long since shuttered morphological rule?
"Gobble" even seems to have a frequentative sense; one can hardly gobble without many gobbings. Unless the thing gobbled is quite small, of course, but that reflects no error on the part of the gobbler.
This -le/-re rule is one which I think can be made the scene of much linguistic innovation, if brought back. It also suggests backformations: "scribe" as a verb, perhaps, from "scribble", though (a) it seems that there already exists such a verb, though the first meaning listed in the OED isn't what I'd expected, and (b) it's not clear to me whether this is really a backformation; there is a frequentative "scribble" that has to do with carding wool and is of Germanic origin, apparently related to "scrub" ("Prob. from LG.; cf. the synonymous G. schrubbeln, schrobbeln, schrobeln, schruppeln, schroppeln, Sw. skrabbla; the vb. is a frequentative f. LG., Ger. schrubben, schrobben: see SCRUB v."), and the more familiar writing-related "scribble" has this etymological note attached to it: "app. ad. late med.L. scr{imac}bill{amac}re (cf. rare class. L. conscr{imac}bill{amac}re), a diminutive formation on L. scr{imac}b{ebreve}re to write. Cf. G. skribbeln, skribeln, for which recent writers substitute schreibeln, f. schreiben; OHG. had scribiln (? î), ‘scriptitare’.". According to what Wikipedia says about frequentatives in Latin, "scriptitare" has the right form to qualifiy, but I have no idea what it's doing in that note—it seems to be in apposition to "scribilôn", but what's its rôle in all this? I have no idea. And "scribble" doesn't appear to have a particularly frequentative meaning. But anyway, "scribe". "Nib" is later than "nibble", as the dog star is than Osiris. I was going to suggest "battle" as an innovative freq. of "beat" but it turns out there already is one, for "bat"! (Perhaps.) Maybe we can call the process of driving around looking for parking "drivelling". Or we could introduce "riddle", to read over and over again because of fatigue, incomprehension, or the like, as in "I've been riddling the Analogies of Experience for weeks and I'm no better off than I was when I began".
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