Someone once told me something interesting about the G sounds in linguistics, but I don’t remember what it was. I am inclined to think it had something to do with the prevalence of G words involved in eating, specifically eating to excess, although they seem to derive equally, and perhaps not coincidentally (if we want to make some claims about grotesque topography in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel) from other words for large size, anatomy, geographical formations, and the formation of small drops; gut as a term of the stomach and lower digestive apparatus appears to derive from Old English and still earlier a proto-Germanic word for a stream or channel (hence also, gutter), however, etymologies overlap and intertwine as “guttle” (below) comes not from gut perhaps, but guzzle, which has its roots in the Old French gossiller (to vomit, alternately, prattle) and which derives from gosile, for throat—not uncoincidentally a sort of carnal channel itself, which widens along the way to become the gut. And now even I am confused.
gurgulio (n) from Latin = gullet, obs.—meaning, well, the gullet. Extended to mean “appetite for food,” as in Randolph (1630): “his palate is lost, and with it his gurgulio.” Nature abhors a vacuum, after all.
gutling (n)—“a great eater; a glutton.” obs, exc. dial., says the Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), which I originally took to mean “obsolete and exceedingly dialect,” but in fact means “obsolete, except in dialect,” although they do not specify which dialects or of whence.
guttle (n)—The stuff of gluttony, which is to say, what one consumes gluttonously. It derives, interestingly, from the use of gut as a verb meaning not to eviscerate or “de-gut,” as in (modern) common parlance, but rather to stuff oneself. You know, really muscle one’s guts around with foodstuffs. Hence guttle also as a verb, for which we have “to eat voraciously; to gormandize.” I have elsewhere (see Food and Trembling, 2011) gotten into Walter Benjamin’s use of go(u)rmandize that is so out of keeping with either the Gastronomic Hierarchy (in descending order of refinement: gastronome, gourmet, friand, gourmand, goulu, goinfre), or Brillat-Savarin’s definition, elaborated in The Physiology of Taste, or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy (1825). Without revisiting all that here, it suffices to note that the OED’s use of gormandize is controversial.Although, how controversial really depends on who you ask and whether or not they’ve been dead for 150 years.
guttable (adj)—“that may be ‘gutted,’ or guzzled.” Or, I should think, guttled? The strange thing is the OED only gives it as an adjective, but in the example provided, from Swift, it clearly operates as a noun or, more accurately, a nominalized adjective: “I have plenty of guttables; if we had agreeable companions as plenty as woodcocks, ducks, snipes…this would be a paradise” (1735). Slippery stuff, English. There is something very nice about the sentiment in Swift—like, “Oh, we have so much delicious food, now if only we had people to eat it with who were as enjoyable company as the food is fare, everything would be just perfect.” It defies the greed implied by many of the other terms that constellate around the idea of gluttony, appealing to the notion that the appreciation of great food invites not only voracity but also good company, that the bounty lies not only in the quantity but the sharing thereof.
To say nothing of gorge, gnaw, glut, gulp, and so forth. Meaning weaves and reels, and we with it.
1 Frederick Dedekind, Grobianus et Grobiana, 1739, translated by Roger Bull.