the.com/gush
the emotional flood and the geological one share a verb because both refuse to be contained
means To pour or spill out suddenly and copiously, whether literally as liquid or figuratively as effusive, over-the-top emotion.
from Likely Middle English 'guschen,' probably echoic — a word built to sound like the thing it names, the splash and rush of liquid breaking loose. It has cousins in the Germanic family (compare dialectal forms tied to gushing and gulping), and that imitative root is why it feels equally at home describing a burst pipe and a person spilling praise: both make the same uncontainable noise.
- oil origin
- gushers spray crude hundreds of feet skyward, uncapped
- old norse
- likely echoes the Norse gusa, to spurt
- sound word
- its noise mimics the rush it names
- emotional sense
- praise so heavy it becomes a liquid
- medical use
- doctors say it of arterial bleeding, unromantically
niagara falls — 750,000 gallons of water flow over per second
old faithful — geyser erupts 130 feet high every 60-110 minutes in yellowstone
deepwater horizon oil spill — 210,000 barrels per day gushed into gulf of mexico in 2010