askchapo

Goober. Not even joking.

I really enjoy language. Doesn't matter which one, doesn't matter what aspect of it. I just thoroughly enjoy learning about language. So it's not uncommon for me to encounter a word and ponder its etymology or whether it's related to another word, that sort of thing, and I'll be preoccupied with figuring out this little linguistic riddle that I have happened to encounter somewhere in my life. And of course this is exactly happens when I encounter the word "goober" one time.

I mean, wtf kind of a word is goober anyway? Seems like there's nothing like it in English. So I look up the etymology of the word.

Turns out that goober likely comes from the central & south African word for peanut - nguba. So immediately "goober" is associated with slavery. Very cool. What a start!

The word nguba makes it over to the US and then it develops racist and classist undertones because "goober" begins to refer to people, specifically backwards, uncultured, and largely black people. It's the uncultured and uncivilised people who call peanuts nguba, thus they themselves become goobers.

For such a seemingly benign word that's about as mild an insult as you could imagine, it carries the weight of slavery, the white man's burden, and largely institutionalised classism on its shoulders.