'Quaffs, crams, and guttles'

A new word discovered while reading John Dryden’s translation of the Sixth Satire of the Roman poet Persius: 

“He sprinkles pepper with a sparing hand.

His jolly brother, opposite in sense,

Laughs at his thrift; and, lavish of expence,

Quaffs, crams, and guttles, in his own defence.”

 

Guttle is defined by Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary as “to feed luxuriously; to gormandise. A low word.” The OED is a little less dismissive. As an intransitive verb it gives “to eat voraciously; to gormandize.” In the transitive form: “to devour or swallow greedily.” The dictionary also includes guttlesome and guttler. For the latter it cites Robert Browning in “Fust and His Friends: An Epilogue” (Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in Their Day, 1887):

 

“’Tis said, in debauchery’s guild

Admitted prime guttler and guzzler — O swine! –

To honor thy headship, those tosspots so swille

That out of their table there sprouted a vine . . .”

 

The OED offers an uncertain etymology in gut, a word borrowed from German meaning, in English, “a particular portion of the lower alimentary canal between the pylorus and the anus.” In modern demotic English, an ample belly.

 

Just the other day I witnessed an unashamed public act of guttling. I stopped for a cup of coffee at a convenience store where I saw a man, large and middle-aged, seated at a table and cramming an entire breakfast sandwich into his mouth, like some kind of frat stunt. I feared choking, and mentally reviewed my Heimlich technique, but he chewed away, suggesting he had a lot of practice. He swallowed the first sandwich and was unwrapping the second when I left. He reminded me of a snake eating an improbably large snack. Of course, snakes have no intermaxillary bone, unlike most humans, and can readily swallow a mere breakfast sandwich.