I’ve stumbled across a word that I can’t find in Japanese!
Gleek (as in the saliva that squirts from under your tongue if you yawn or eat something sour)
That’s not saying it doesn’t exist, but at least it doesn’t seem to be very widely used. I checked Eijiro, JDic, the Goo dictionary, and I even searched for a wikipedia article in Japanese – Nothing. Eijiro came the closest, but it was only an entry for a 3 player card game with the same name.
Because I can easily gleek on command, I feel that I should be able to accurately convey the term in Japanese.
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I don’t see it in oxford or cambridge english dictionaries either.
Are you sure it’s proper english.
It’s definitely a well-known phenomenon, and a regularly used term at least in southern California: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleeking
I asked my Japanese students about it about an hour ago, and they know exactly what I’m talking about, but they don’t say anything to express the phenomenon.
It’s a pretty new word… Maybe 10 or 20 years old? Before that, it was called ’snake spitting’. (Because it often makes 2 streams of spit.)
It’s actually not that hard, and most people can do it if they practice… What I’ve found, though, is that once you manage to make your mouth do it on command, you’re more likely to do it by accident ever after.
I didn’t know there was an english word for it either.
Learned to do it as a kid, and yes, it happens a lot more by accident afterwards.
Action portrays a hundred words.
I’d kill to gleek. I’ve never been able to do it and I feel like less of a man, because of the fact.
We know of the gleeking in Northern California too. My friends and I used to gleek at each other to pass time in Highschool. When you get good at it, it can be done very stealthily without disturbing a class (as in definition number 4 in the urbandicitonary – warning feint of heart should not read definition 6).
We use the same word here in Vancouver, Canada, so it’s not just a california thing i guess. I can’t seem to find it in any german dictionaries either (and I’m learning german right now). I’ll try to remember to ask some germans if they have a word for it too.
Here in the American south, I’ve only ever encountered the word in Shakespeare.
We always called it ’snaking’, and I never was able to do it.
I suppose that you could verb ’snake’ somehow, but you’d still end up with a lot of explanation. I think you’d be best to katakanize it and leave it alone. 