mushmouthn.adj.

1868 W. W. Glazier Hist. Prison Life in South xiv. 110 Responses of—‘Louder, old mush mouth’,..did not tend to soothe him in the least.

1930 Amer. Speech 5 239 Mushmouth, one who talks indistinctly. ‘The chapel-speaker was a mushmouth.’

1942 L. V. Berrey & M. Van den Bark Amer. Thes. Slang §188/6 Mush-mouth, poorly enunciated speech.

1979 Morning Bull. (Rockhampton, Queensland) 5 Nov. 6/2 The evidence is everywhere. The once brisk American spoken by Politicians has decayed into a tongue that can only be called mushmouth.

1991 Newsweek 2 Dec. 75/3 From ‘dabble (to wash or rinse quickly)’ right through to ‘hyuh’ (i.e., ‘here’) the Dictionary..catalogs the crazy ways we talked before being mass-commed into a nation of mush-mouths.

1994 W. Gaddis Frolic of his Own 51 Do you think they haven't called here? One of these mushmouths from something called the South Georgia Pilot.

1902 P. J. Dalton in Bridgeman's Mag. Nov. 6/1 Such epithets are unfit for a place in our Magazine and are dagger thrusts to the heart of their relatives and sorrowing families. Also such terms as Tar Heel Jack, Mush Mouth Tom and Dead Beat Mulligan are working on such and such a job, under the direction of One-Eyed Connelly.

1913 Blacksmith's Jrnl. Sept. 9/2 During the Milwaukee Convention, Mush-mouth Hagerty was supposed to have a letter in his possession with the information that the writer had once threatened to scab.

1923 Crisis Nov. 21/1 Timothy Crawford's just a mush-mouth fibber.

1977 Washington Post (Nexis) 4 Dec. d4 The thing we coaches are supposed to say..is that mush-mouth stuff about how you adapt your style each year to the players you have.

1983 E. Leonard LaBrava (1985) ii. 17 He read nasty letters all day. Letters addressed to..‘The Mushmouth Motherfucker from Georgia’.

1992 N.Y. Times Mag. 6 Sept. 44/1 To a New Yorker, a Southern accent is mush-mouth, grating, irritating or, at worst contemptible.