gum up

Verb

gum up (third-person singular simple present gums up, present participle gumming up, simple past and past participle gummed up)

1. (intransitive) To become gooey or gummy.
   • Some types of lubricating grease gum up as they age.
2. (transitive) To cause to be gooey or gummy, especially with the effect of obstructing the operation of some mechanism or process.
   • Aging grease had gummed up the record changer.
   • I guess they's about 6 other clubs in the American League that if they had seen my name in the dead they wouldn't shed off enough tears to gum up the infield.1919, Ring Lardner Sr., chapter 2, in The Real Dope
3. (broadly, idiomatic, transitive) To make non-functional; to interfere with or put into a state of disorder; to ruin.
   • He had the car pushed to a near-by stable, amidst the mixed emotions of the little crowd, and next day he had it hauled home. / "You were right," he said, when I met him out again in it, a week later. "It was gummed up, so to speak; but it's working like a charm to-day.[…]"1918, Henry B[lake] Fuller, On the Stairs, Boston, Mass.; New York, N.Y.: Hougton Mifflin Company; Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, →OCLC, part V, section I, pages 148–149
   • Erhard presumably felt it was no time to give his enemies grounds for charging him with gumming up relations with France.1966 July 29, “Europe: Permanent Watch?”, in Time