Wordie: Glom: Comments

Comment by bilby, about 1 month ago

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:08:03 +0000

"On Red Square, the crowd broke down into five types: the missionaries - usually young girls, with scrubbed looks and religious zeal, doing good works for which they expected rewards; the provincials - the slightly rough-hewn youth who had glommed onto the orgs for a trip to the capital or some nationalistic sentiment; the suburbans, average-looking kids who wanted to be part of something larger; the professionals - the youth who realize in today's Russia, United/Just Russia and Putin are the only game in town (in the old days they would belong to the Komsomol); and the goons - sharp-faced thugs who constantly scanned the crowd hoping for some trouble."
- Michael Hammerschlag, 'Putin's Children', International Herald Tribune, 5 July 2007.

Comment by bilby, about 1 year ago

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:01:48 +0000

". . .salespersons who glom onto you and relentlessly hector you until you buy a service agreement."
-- Dave Barry, 'Service Calls', Washington Post, September 2, 2001

In the news (for what it's worth)

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 01:21:34 +0000

From the New York Times, November 8, 2007:

Growing up Irish in Queens and on Long Island, Daniel Cassidy was nicknamed Glom.

“I used to ask my mother, ‘Why Glom?’ and she’d say, ‘Because you’re always grabbing, always taking things,’” he said, imitating his mother’s accent and limited patience, shaped by a lifetime in Irish neighborhoods in New York City.

It was not exactly an etymological explanation, and Mr. Cassidy’s curiosity about the working-class Irish vernacular he grew up with kept growing. Some years back, leafing through a pocket Gaelic dictionary, he began looking for phonetic equivalents of the terms, which English dictionaries described as having “unknown origin.”

“Glom” seemed to come from the Irish word “glam,” meaning to grab or to snatch. He found the word “balbhán,” meaning a silent person, and he surmised that it was why his quiet grandfather was called the similarly pronounced Boliver.