mouthful of marbles
- idiom
- Informal
:
hablar como si tuviera la boca llena
- After his dental surgery, he sounded like he had a mouthful of marbles when he spoke.
Examples
-
Whenever he gets nervous, he talks as if he has a mouthful of marbles.
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The phone connection was so bad, her words came across like a mouthful of marbles.
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He spoke in a mouthful of marbles during the presentation.
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Why does she always sound like a mouthful of marbles?
-
After his dental surgery, he sounded like he had a mouthful of marbles when he spoke.
-
The phone connection was so bad, her words came across like a mouthful of marbles.
-
Whenever he gets nervous, he talks as if he has a mouthful of marbles.
Synonyms
6
3.6
Speaking quietly and not clearly so people cannot understand
3
6.0
Words spoken slowly and unclearly because someone is very tired, ill, or drunk
Antonyms
How Clear
Surface Forms
Morphology
mouthful + of + marbles
The figurative meaning follows directly from the literal components: a 'mouthful' is something that fills the mouth and 'marbles' are small hard balls, so having a mouthful of marbles plausibly makes speech indistinct. This concrete, image-based mapping is easily inferable by a B1 learner who knows the constituent words, so the expression is compositional and transparent.
Etymology
Mouthful of marbles comes from the clear picture of someone with a mouthful of marbles; the hard, round balls muffle the voice and make words roll together. That's why people use it to say speech is 'unclear' or 'hard to understand'.