I wondered for years where my mother had gotten that word. "You look like a glom," she would say, especially if I was unkempt, underdressed, and self-pitying. I'm not criticising her, it probably helped. I was never able to get a handle on what it meant, but the sound of it alone seems to convey it, doesn't it?
For random reasons I decided to try again, with similar lack of success. But DuckDuckGo gave me a link to Althouse in 2010, where she quoted the word "glomming" for males looking on while one man spoke with a woman. One of the commenters had apparently said
"Glom" was used by my mother to describe a sullen, unsocialised male: "you look like a glom in that shirt." Everyone else used it to describe attaching oneself or sticking on to something - glomming on to. Given my heritage, I concluded that the meanings were related to the Swedish word for oatmeal. I have been unable to find any authority who thinks this even remotely possible. However, a similar word roughly equivalent to "gloomy" was reported to me by a Norwegian.
If I had to push my guess beyond provable limits, I would relate it to PIE *ghel, melancholy, rather than Proto-Germ. *klamm, stuck together (clamp, clam).
I was thrilled to see this. It validated so much of my childhood experience. Except when I clicked through I found it it was written by me, in 2010.
How does it feel to be the world's expert?
ReplyDeleteFWIW, the word didn't appear in my family's tradition, but it did in my wife's (mostly German), as a verb meaning to acquire on the spur of the moment. The connotation was usually that this was a good luck discovery and that the former owner did not properly appreciate the value of the thing glommed.