Talk:goober

Yokel

"Goober" is commonly used to refer, often affectionately, to a yokel. However, I'm having a hard time finding a reliable source for this usage. Famously, the character Goober Pyle from The Andy Griffith Show was such a "goober". I believe the name was capitalizing on this sense, although it's possible the character may have promoted this usage. Either way, we need some hard evidence. I'm going to start rooting through the slang dictionaries, if no one else can find this quickly. ~ Jeff Q 05:24, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

Presumably that was just a generalization or misunderstanding of its Civil War era sense referring specifically to the hillbillies of the Carolina and Georgia pine barrens. — LlywelynII 20:03, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Drooling and dripping

I could see how this could show up from sound, the yokel sense, or association with peanut butter but neither the OED nor MW has either verb sense given here. — LlywelynII 20:08, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Etymologies

Peanuts

Currently, we have an unsourced claim that the goober pea entered English through Gullah. MW just sources it to "a Bantu language" ("akin to Kimbundu ŋguba") and the OED specifies Kikongo (=Kongo) with no mention of a Gullah intermediary. — LlywelynII 20:03, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Poking around, I find a few references which seem to say it comes from Gullah, but on close inspection most of them only really claim the word exists in Gullah, e.g. WaPo has an article on "Some words with roots in Gullah" but the text says "Lorenzo Dow Turner spent years researching the roots of Gullah words". The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms also just says it originated in Africa as Bantu nguba (and was brought to the American South by African slaves circa 1834, spreading outside the South in the past 50 years). They add that the (or a) Kongo word for "peanut" is npinda, which gave rise to South Carolinian pinder (“peanut”), and WaPo says goober’s etymon nguba is KiMbundu (not KiKongo), seemingly in line with MW. Maybe @Metaknowledge can tell whether nguba is a Kongo or/and Mbundu word. - -sche (discuss) 20:50, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Nguba definitely a word of this meaning in both Kongo and Kimbundu (best not to call it Mbundu, as to disambiguate it from Umbundu). I'm fine with the entry mentioning both, and I have a print source on borrowings in Gullah that I can check in about a week. As for the English word coming from Gullah, it obviously came from some sort of African-American mixed language, but if we don't have a source to back it up, we should demote the reference to Gullah as as comparandum rather than an etymon. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:06, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Simpletons

Presumably, this developed from the generalized 'yokel' sense (via Gomer and Goober Pyle) mentioned by Mr Q above which presumably developed from the slang demonym for the Sandhill hillbillies, but MW actually sources it to a development in the 1980s of slang goob, goober meaning "kiss, pimple, penis", which they ascribe to "probably of imitative origin". Neither they nor the OED nor we have a "goob" entry; when I used it in the '80s and '90s, I parsed it as a clipped form of "goober" and not as anything related to penises or pimples, let alone kisses. — LlywelynII 20:05, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

yeah it's strange that a single etymology is presented for all the meanings, which is unlikely