jubble

qms commented on the word jubble

Reading an article on the Guardian site by a chef offering his recipes for breakfast smoothies, I came across this passage.

“I was as happy as bone marrow on toast. But as I’ve moved into my 30s, jubbly bits have started forming where once there was no jubble, and the mornings after those foggy nights have become crippling. ”

Jubble? Jubbly? These are new to me so I had recourse to Wordnik, where I found no succor. The most to be found there is a doubtful suggestion that a jubbly is a female breast. Googling turned up quite a bit on the more frivolous and trivia-oriented sites. One person averred that a jubble was a some sort of goblin-like creature. There is a game for children (I presume) called Jubble Bubble. There is a website empty of content called jubble.com and a facebook page for someone using that handle too.

The term “lovely jubbly” was coined in a the British sitcom, “Only Fools and Horses,” to mean a stroke of good luck, and there seems to be a UK soft drink called Jubbly. But what has any of this to do with a thirtyish chef encountering the frailties of advancing age? In context the quote seems to employ “jubble” to mean discomfort or rough patches, a usage not obviously rooted in the other examples I can find. Is this some sort of professional kitchen slang that is just now leaking out of its croute, so to speak?

I observe that all or most of the examples of jubble and jubbly that I find are British. The English seem to have a fascination with the syllable “jub.” Why should this be? Perhaps some native of that cloud-shrouded isle can shine a light into the haze?

September 19, 2014

hernesheir commented on the word jubble

I get the sense of jiggly + bubbly. Clement Clark Moore's poem "A visit from St. Nicholas" describes the right jolly old elf's stomach as "shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly". That is, jubbly.

A swollen, rising, restive sea was called a jubble.

"The sea at this place is seldom calm, even when the winds are still. What is technically called a 'jubble' rises perpetually upon the rocks, and renders it unsafe for very small craft to anchor within their shadow." -- The Literary Souvenir; or, Cabinet of Poetry and Romance, ed. by Alaric Alexander Watts p.80. 1831.

"..although it blew what the sailors call, with the expressive coarseness of their phraseology, a snoring breeze, and the tide, already beginning to flow, rose, on meeting the opposite wind, in a rough, cross jubble'.“ ibid, p.95.

September 20, 2014

qms commented on the word jubble

As usual hernesheir is endlessly resourceful. The examples from 1831 of "jubble" to mean a turbulent surface (if I understand correctly) seem consonant with the usage in the Guardian article, but I am puzzled by the absence of any instances in print between 1831 and 2014. It is strange that more current usage seems uninfluenced by the precedent and I doubt that our chef ( who reports that he has been spending 15 hours per day in the kitchen since the age of 19) would be comfortable with such venerable language. I have a hunch something else is going on here. 

September 20, 2014

yarb commented on the word jubble

This may be a coinage based on the aforesaid "lovely jubbly". This is in widespread usage to mean "that's good", "good-oh", in a slightly ironic way. But the sound puts one in mind of jelly, and trouble, and belly, and bubble, hence perhaps, the usage. While I agree that the citation is pretty outré, so must many citations be, and this one made perfect intuitive sense to me. I don't mean to diminish HH's nautical proposal, but I struggle to see how it reaches us across such a void.

September 26, 2014