Gleek

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Seth from Tyler, Texas.

Hi, Seth. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a question.

I was up late pondering things, as often happens, and I was remembering an episode being in the dentist’s chair.

And the dentist kind of was working in my mouth and kind of flinched back, and you got me.

And, you know, I didn’t, of course, intentionally spit, but it was kind of an involuntary release of saliva.

And it reminded me also of a friend that I had from Puerto Rico when I was a kid, and he did something similar, and he called it gleek.

That was his word for it.

But I was just wondering if there was any sort of word to describe this phenomenon.

Oh, yeah, definitely gleek is the word for it, as a matter of fact.

How old were you when you and your Puerto Rican friend talked about this?

Gosh, I was probably—what year?

12, 13.

1994, 5-ish.

Okay, that’s pretty good.

That’s pretty good.

A number of years ago, on my old website, the Double Tongue Dictionary, I made an entry for GLEEC.

And GLEEC means to spit saliva from under the tongue.

It can mean other things, but usually it means to eject liquid from your mouth in a stream.

And there were a number of commenters and people who remembered using this word in the 80s, and some of them claimed the 70s.

I don’t know whether or not they were telling the truth.

I assume that they were.

But the best theory that we have is that this word gleek, G-L-E-E-K, comes from super friends, from the monkey of the same name who would kind of just shed saliva every time he got really excited and started making monkey noises.

But, yeah, that’s the word.

And it’s very slangy.

It’s pretty much used by people who grew up in the 70s and 80s and 90s.

Prior to that, I don’t think there was a word for it.

Yeah, I don’t know.

I always wanted to learn how to do it.

There was a kid in my sixth grade class who could do it.

And I’ve tried.

I’ve gone online.

There are videos that tell you how to do it.

YouTube videos, if you’re not squicked out by gleeking.

I tried to do it, but I choked myself.

Gleek, as a word, is used to describe fans of the show Glee, so kind of a confluence of glee and geek.

Yeah, there’s enough semantic differentiation there, so there shouldn’t be too much collision happening.

There’s an older form of gleek that comes from Shakespeare.

It means to trick or to make a joke about somebody or at somebody, but that’s unrelated as well.

You can find videos of Gleek the monkey gleeking on YouTube if you just Google.

That’s fantastic.

Well, I appreciate it.

That clears it right up.

Yeah, sure.

Someone I think had mentioned spittle also, and that sort of works, but not quite.

Yeah, like I say, go to our website at waywordradio.org and search the word Gleek, G-L-E-E-K, and you’ll find everything that I researched on that.

Great.

Well, thank you guys so much.

Yeah, sure, Seth.

Thanks, Seth.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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