clabber - From Ulster to America
Source: From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English
Author: Michael Montgomery
Comments: From Ulster to America recounts the lasting impact eighteenth-century settlers from Ulster have made on the development of the English language of the United States. The book documents over 500 vocabulary items contributed to American English by these ‘Scotch-Irish’ settlers. Each ‘shared’ term with its meaning is authenticated by quotations from both sides of the Atlantic. This searchable online version of his book takes its text from the dictionary part of the second edition published by the Ullans Press in 2017.
clabber, clabour, clobber n Mud, mire (hence clabbers n Clumpy mud); especially in the U.S., milk that has begun to sour and curdle (= bonny clabber); the term refers only to soured milk in the U.S.: see 1949 Kurath citation). Hence vb Of milk: to turn sour and thicken, curdle; of weather: to cloud up. Hence clabbery adj Curdled. [the sense ‘soured, curdled milk’ is usually taken as an extension from Irish clábar ‘mud’, but for an alternative etymology see 1960 Malone Bonnyclabber, which derives the term from bonnyclabber ‘milk of the dasher (i.e. of a stage fit to be churned)’ < Irish bainne ‘milk’ + clabar ‘sour thick milk’ < clabaire ‘inverted cup through which the churndash passes’; oed attests clabber only from 1824; snd clabber n ‘mud, clay, dirt, mire’; dare clabber n1 1 ‘sour milk that has thickened or curdled’ chiefly South, Midland, West]
Ulst.:
1813 Porter Poetical Attempts Poor creature! he was doom’d to paddle / Thro’ clabour since he quat the cradle.
1863 Hume Rabbin’s Ollminick 6 The days is very short, an’ mebby the groun’s saft an’ clabbery, but ye musn’t min’ that.
1880 Patterson Antrim/Down Glossary 19 clabber = mud: ‘They clodded clabber at me’.
1910 Joyce English in Ireland 235 clabber = mud, thick milk.
1923 Lutton Montiaghisms 14 clabber = soft clay, sediment of drains, dirt of roads, puddle.
1942 Bangor Words 17 clabbers = fluid mud in the streets: ‘You are all over clabbers’.
c1955 Montgomery Heard in Ulster 25 clabber = road muck of the color/consistency of wet cement, usually swept into piles by ‘surface-men’.
1983 Marshall Drumlister 32 The deil a man in this townlan’ / Wos claner raired nor me, / But I’m livin’ in Drumlister / In clabber to the knee.
1991 O’Kane You Don’t Say 26 clabber = thick, clinging mud such as might be found around a gate in winter where cattle have trampled the ground into an impassable broth.
U.S.:
1784 Lipscomb’s Journal 272 We made our Brackfast with the hens with a few slices of Bacon & half bushel of Clabber & Butter milk.
1908 Payne Word-list East Alabama 299 clabber = milk that is allowed to stand until it sours and thickens.
1949 Kurath Word Geog East US 36 Another South Midland expression is clabber milk, clabbered milk, which is here more common than the simple Southern clabber.
1953 Randolph and Wilson Down in Holler 235 clabber = cloudy, as when the sky clabbers up before a storm.
1997 Montgomery Coll This milk will clabber if you set it in a warm place.
1997 Nelson Country Folklore 62 Churning was a children’s job. The milk had set by the kitchen stove in a crock jar, getting clabbered and ready to churn. Mama or Grandma placed it in the churn, and we pushed the dash up and down until we had butter and buttermilk.
1999 Nelson Aroma and Memories 16 We girls helped to churn the clabbered milk until it turned into butter and buttermilk.
