slubber

I came across slubberingly in a diary entry from Samuel Pepys.  His candle was almost out and in his haste he wrote slubberingly.  Now that’s a good word! How did we lose it?

The starting point is the verb to slubber, probably from Old German and with the basic sense ‘to smear or stain’.  From there it was directed by the use of particles into other meanings. To slubber up something is to cover it with mucky stuff and eventually to conceal it.  To slubber over something is to do it in a carless fashion and so to botch it.  A slubbering worker is careless and slovenly.  To do something (such as write a diary entry) slubberingly is to do it in an untidy fashion.

Slubber and all its forms disappeared in the 1700s — although there is one late entry in 1941:

Time and again have slubbered through

With slip and slapdash what I do.

W. H. Auden, New Year Letter i. 24

Slubber is the kind of word Auden would have liked.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that the word is now chiefly dialectal, and it does indeed appear in a wide range of dialects in the English Dialect Dictionary with citations in the 1800s, with examples of its use from Scotland to Cornwall.  Whether it is still in use or not who can say.

This dictionary adds one more form — slubbery.  Slubbery stuff is slimy, sloppy, yucky.

We need this word!