umble
n.— «Even if you have layered on the clothes, you may not be immune from a condition Klegg likes to refer to as “the umbles.” These are the symptoms of hypothermia. “People start stumbling, fumbling, mumbling or grumbling,” the physician said. “Speech can get slurred. People can get whiny. You may have it, but you don’t know it.”» —“Deep Freeze” by Chris Meehan Kalamazoon Gazette (Michigan) Feb. 2, 2007. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
A young caller from the Hudson Valley of New York wonders about his grandmother’s use of stemwinder to praise a speech she thought was excellent. In the early 1800s, people used pocket watches that had to be wound with a tiny key. Once someone...
Amid court-ordered busing in the 1970s, a middle-school teacher tried to distract her nervous students on the first day of class with this strange assignment: find a monarch caterpillar. The result? A memorable lesson in the miracle of metamorphosis...