Rumbling-pot

[Peter A. McGraw]

Somewhat to my befuddlement, I now have an "OED? OED?"-type query of my own
about a word of foreign origin.

This one is not a foreign word, but an English translation of one, and used
exclusively as such as far as I know, and it's admittedly pretty esoteric.
That may be why it doesn't appear in the OED--at least I was unable to find
it there.

My trail to the OED started at a web site devoted to Dutch folk songs.
There was a passage in a beloved song on a record (yes, record) I have that
I could never quite make out, so I decided to see if the text was to be
found somewhere on the web, and of course it was.  While looking for this
song, I ran across another version of it in which a child sings about
someone creating various musical instruments, each of which then makes a
characteristic sound that's represented onomatopoeically (along the lines
of: "the flute went tootle-tootle").

One of the instruments was a foekepot, which went "goeze goeze" ([xu:z@
xu:z@]).  My big Dutch dictionary identified foekepot as a dialect variant
of rommelpot.  My Dutch-English dictionary translated rommelpot as
"rumbling-pot."  None the wiser, I looked for rumbling-pot in every English
dictionary I happened to have handy, and then the OED--in vain.

Most of the 19 web sites turned up by Google were Dutch, some of them
written in Dutch and some in English, but even the ones describing the
rommelpot in Dutch offered the English translation rumbling-pot.  One site
was Danish, with an English text referring to a "rumbling pot (rumlepot)."
In the English-language Dutch sites, the English word is sometimes used for
clarification alongside the original word, but sometimes it's used alone.
One Dutch language site has this curious passage which, in a long
discussion with many occurrences of rommelpot, inexplicably substitutes the
English translation:

"Wij pleiten voor het waarderen van de rommelpot als
een volwaardig muziekinstrument.
De rumbling pot verdient een plek in de ritmesectie en neemt zonodig op een
boeiende manier de plek van de contrabas over."

Looks like an English word to me, even if it is an esoteric one.
Admittedly I haven't seen it in actual (as opposed to virtual) print except
in my Dutch-English dictionary.

Maybe Jesse can say whether the OED has overlooked this word, or decided it
was too esoteric to merit inclusion.

Peter Mc.

*****************************************************************
Peter A. McGraw       Linfield College        McMinnville, Oregon
******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ************************