"DROOLING"

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 35, 11 February 1939, Page 2 (Supplement)

"DROOLING"

LOS ANGELES. DROOLING " is the American student's word for what happens when the professor has exhausted his material, but not his time, and must go on talking until the buzzer goes. At least, so I am informed by some of my young friends. They have certainly found an expressive word; almost onomatopoeic. Of course, drooling is not confined to professors; drooling is world-wide; only until students over here grimly set about finding a word for it, we did not express the idea quite so vividly.

The Scotch have a word for it, "haverin'"; and the English for that is maundering, or drivelling; but I vote for drooling.

It stuns me when I think of the amount of drooling we all have to do. I hate 'drooling myself, but when one's neighbour at a party drools, what is one to do? The answer, I regret to say, is, drool back. An inveterate drooler will not listen to anything but reciprocal drooling, or else she goes oil and says her neighbour is a high-brow. Reciprocal drooling is not so bad, however. You can. do it quite well by making a carefully chosen set of amiable noises, expressing admiration, appreciation, sympathy, commiseration, admiration, and more admiration; easy to make, and those sounds give you plenty of time to think about your own thoughts.

But there is a time when drooling becomes an art. That is, when you suddenly find you must distract the attention of one person from what another person is saying. You must select some subject that is intrinsically interesting, and, as the French would say; de longue haleine; it must go on and on, in a quite Tennysonian and brookish manner, the hearer's attention must be got and kept, and until the other speaker has stopped, and all allusions to the dangerous subject have finished, you must hardly draw breath. The classic example of drooling in England, of course, is the end of "that moth-eaten story about the cheese. I

By Lady Adams

am almost ashamed to quote it. The woman at a dinner party asked her companion if he liked cheese. He 6aid he didn't.

"Does your brother like cheese?" "I haven't got a brother." "But if you had a brother, do you think he would like cheese?"

An old uncle of mine, who was a persistent diner-out, used to ask his wife on the way to a dinner party: "Any topics, mv dear?" and it was one of the numerous odd jobs of his most dutiful spouse to supply my Uncle James with a list of topics which she considered suitable for females to listen to. My Uncle James was the complete drooler. It is wise to keep on tap a few subjects from which to draw in moments of dullness, or emergency. The late Sir Walter Raleigh wrote to that witty talker, the late Lady Elclio:

"It isn't going fast under sail that tires you. It's steering among shoals and shadows. Every time you say something and it's taken not as you meant it, an hour comes off your life." Swift, who made a rule never to speak more than a minute-at a time, laid down his principles:

Conversation Is but carving; (Jive no more to every guest Than he's able to digest. Give him always of the prime, And but little at a tima. Carve to all but just enough. Let them neither starve nor stuff. And, that you may have your due, Let some neighbour carve for you. Tennyson, through his Northern Farmer, expressed drooling exactly. He used to go to church before his Sally died, and heard the parson: A bummin' awaay loike a buzzard-clock o» r cr my 'ead, An' I niver knaw'd whot a mean'd, bat I tliowt a 'ad siimmut to saav, An' I tliowt a said whot a owt to "'a said an* I coom'd awaay. A queer word —drooling; a word that grips you. To quote Tennyson again: As when we dwell upon a word we know, Repeating, till the word we know so well •Becomes a wonder, and we know not why.