driveller

plural drivellers

1. Someone who drivels.

   I can smash Shakspeare; I can prove Milton to be a driveller, or the contrary: but, for preference, take, as I have said, the abusive line.

   1841, Various, Punch, or the London Charivari. Vol. 1, July 31, 1841

   4 more examples

   Think of the men whom I may call book-eaters! Dr. Parr was a driveller; Porson was a sort of learned pig who routed up truffles in the classic garden; poor Buckle became, through stress of books, a shallow thinker; Mezzofanti, with his sixty-four languages and dialects, was perilously like a fool; and more than one modern professor may be counted as nothing else but a vain, over-educated boor.

   1893, James Runciman, Side Lights

   [416:6] What intelligent Christian can believe that a minister, instructed by Paul or Peter, and filling one of the most important stations in the apostolic Church, was verily such an ignorant driveller?

   1859, W.D. [William Dool] Killen, The Ancient Church

   "All able men," adds Macaulay, "ridiculed him as a dunce, a driveller, a child who never knew his own mind an hour together; and yet he overreached them all."

   1874, John Lord, A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon

   And, to leave this miserable driveller without a pretence for his cowardice, the Prince asks it as a personal favour of me, forsooth, not to press my just and reasonable request at this moment.

   1893, Sir Walter Scott, Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete

2. UKThe pole used to launch the beer-soaked cloth in the game of dwile flonking.

   Well away from the centre of sanity is dwile flonking. In this game, or possibly sport, a circle of girters dances round a member of the opposing team who revolves in the opposite direction holding a driveller.

   1976, Richard Boston, Beer and skittles, page 156