How Did I Miss this Creepy Onomatopoetic Word?

I was looking up a word's date of origin on dictionary.com and noticed this "teaser entry" over in the sidebar.

I can't remember ever encountering this word.

And it's been around since the 1600s.

It sounds like the sort of word Nabokov would love and use. He was always great with finding obscure words in the English language and using them as if they were everyday currency. That's part of the charm of his style. That it's half lucid and half purple prose, the latter quality probably due to the way he learned the English language.

I'm guessing trilingual Nabokov learned English in true polymath, scholarly eremite fashion. In other words, I'd wager it was intensive and exhaustive but somewhat haphazard, that he probably just swallowed dictionaries whole and thus fell in love with words based on personal preference and with no sense of weightedness, no sense of how valuable that word was as actual currency in the vernacular or even the formal writing sense.

That's a good thing.

I've seen this phenomenon before with weird thinkers, odd scholars, and Nabokov was definitely one of those. Languages were clearly his religion. I wonder how much of his son Dmitri is reflected in the English translation of Invitation to a Beheading? I love that little novel.

I think it's creepy that it's speculated that bleb is a word that was created through onomatopoeia.

But it is sort of close to the conventional sound sometimes used (in animated cartoons, anway) when a bubble bursts.

When I make the sound now, say the word several times, it sounds to me more like drops of water dripping from a ceiling, say in a dank room in an abandoned house, falling into a scuzzy puddle below.

But if the sound of a bubble bursting were magnified, I imagine it might sound something like bleb. How strange that the human ear has such exacting attention for such minuscule sounds. It sort of gives me hope. Though I know it shouldn't.

But a blister popping? Ewww. That's fuckin gross.

Bleb.

Here's the entry.


bleb
\ bleb \ , noun;

1. A bubble.
2. Medicine/Medical. A blister or vesicle.


Quotes:

One day, as he was bathing her, a bleb of shampoo had streamed into her eye, and she had kept a hand pressed to it for the rest of the day, quailing away from him whenever he walked past.

-- Kevin Brockmeier, Things That Fall From the Sky

His gaze skims over the computer out the side-yard window, to rest on a fat avocado, a bleb of green light hanging from a branch.

-- Diana Abu-Jaber, Birds of Paradise

Origin: Bleb was first used in the early 1600s. It is considered imitative of a blister itself. It is also related to the Middle English word blob.

Isn't that second sentence much more beautiful than the first one?

It is for me, anyway.

I really like the way that sentence uses the word. It's gorge.

The first sentence doesn't seem to exhibit as much of an ear and visual sense of the word's possiblities--less sprachgefuhl. Although, admittedly the end of that sentence is wonderful: "quailing away from him whenever he walked past." That's D.H. Lawrence-caliber wonderful.

Maybe bleb could be adapted to a different use, could be used in a new sense?

I would suggest that bleb could also function to mean a "really shitty, short blurb that is completely insincere."

Like when a more well-known author is a blurb whore and gives a lesser-known author a blurb like "One of the most promising writers of his generation. A book not to be missed."

That sort of "Fuck You, I'm too important to write a real sentence about your writing" blurb.

I think that could also be a use for bleb.

Usage: "David Sedaris blebbed my fuckin book. Oh well. At least it wasn't Garrison fuckin Keillor."