Conglobulate

Totally irrelevant.

I was running laundry and getting pissed that the load insisted on tangling up. It wouldn’t let me transfer to the dryer piece by piece. I had to wrestle out the whole glob at once. Of course I’m always pissed at cloth. Baseline condition. Me and cloth DO NOT GET ALONG.

The word conglobulate fitted the situation. Then I remembered a peculiar use of the word that I must have read 50 or 60 years ago and never thought about since.

Some writer, maybe Twain? or Thurber? or Steinbeck? was bashing some other writer who believed that birds don’t migrate seasonally. Birds just fly in a spherical pattern, closer and closer, and conglobulate. The conglob falls to the ground and does something or other. The writer who put forth this theory didn’t bother to ask why bird conglobs are not seen everywhere.

As I recall, the conglob theorist was quite respectable, not exactly a scientist but presumed scientifically literate.

Aha. The conglobulator was Samuel Johnson, a master of words but not a master of birds.

Aha 2. Maybe the idea has been in my head without the word.