I said I'd respond to the suggestion of
glub, and by Jove, I will! (Although I very nearly forgot all about it, anonsi.)
A string of letters intended to represent a sound can, I think, be regarded as a word if it becomes a conventional usage. This seems to be true of
glub, as I feel it is used to represent a certain class of bubbling liquid sounds more often than any other expression, apart from
glug, which is already allowed in Chihuahua.
Glub is in Wiktionary, with the definition quoted in the original post, and in the Century Dictionary, cited by Wordnik.com. It doesn't seem to be in any of the Oxford dictionaries bar the very biggest - the OED itself, which has a quote from 1794! The OED's definition is a little more non-committal: "An inarticulate sound rendered by this spelling." By contrast,
Ka-Boom! A Dictionary of Comic Book Words, Symbols & Onomatopoeia provides some quite specific definitions: "The sound made by a person blowing a bubble under water", and "Bubble sounds as those made when a head is held under water against its owner's will".
It is certainly used quite frequently in fiction to depict bubbling sounds, as can be seen by searching in Google Book Search. A rare example of a more figurative use is quoted by Wordnik: "Investors get handed a couple of hundred pages of unreadable glub and are told that it puts them on the same plane as market professionals and company insiders." Perhaps a better choice of word here might have been
glop, "unappetizing food, esp. of a semiliquid consistency."
I think we ought to accept the word
glub. Although there are occasional uses of
glubbed and
glubbing, I think
glub is mainly used as an interjection, so I don't think we should allow those inflections.
But I was interested to note that the same sequence of letters crops up quite often in Google Book Search in a very different context. Scholarly works of philosophy and linguistics often use
glub as a quintessentially meaningless utterance. "Take, for example, the nonsense syllable 'glub' - a meaningless notation," writes Mortimer Jerome Adler, in
Some questions about language: a theory of human discourse and its objects. The author then goes on to discuss what would need to happen for
glub to become the name of fire. Other examples of highbrow usage of
glub: "This fact about the foreign speakers determines that if 'glub' is a word for identity then 'gavagai' is a word for rabbits..." (
Truth and the Absence of Fact) "Glubs (that is, glub things) are no sooner recognized as such than treated with reverence and awe in situ, or solemnly removed to the Great Cache of Glubs in the central temple." (
Anti-realism and Logic) "The ur-stuff of the physical world, which I shall nickname the 'glub', corresponds to the sensory flux." (
Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Field Theory) "if we introduced a new word, 'glub', to abbreviate 'true and not red'... " (
Reflections on meaning) "Imagine that we are given the following definition of the expression 'glub': For every animal
x, (a1)
x is a glub if, and only if,
x is not a mouse, and (a2)
x is a glub if, and only if,
x is a mouse." (
Bertrand Russell Memorial Volume). And so on, and so on.
In the world of these thinkers, it seems,
glub has become a conventional example of something that has no conventional significance; that is
not a word. Does this undermine its case? No, I think it just discredits these scholars, who present themselves as founts of wisdom, but are strangers to the OED and the comic books alike.
Although it's quite irrelevant to the issue, the word reminded me of another comic strip association: the butler Glub in the
Colonel Pewter strip that Arthur Horner drew in the 1950s and 1960s. Glub had been a stone age man, preserved in ice until thawed out by Colonel Pewter, so I suppose his name came from Paleolithic times. Some years later, Glub became a member of the House of Commons, in circumstances that have slipped my mind.
