expectorate

“Talking, coughing, putting out expectorate of any kind — if anyone passes through an area an infected person has been and those molecules with the virus are still hanging in the air, someone can still become infected.”

“I can’t sit there and swallow it. Swish and expectorate!”

Participants expectorate about a thimble-full of saliva into a sterile tube, put it in a plastic bat that can be sealed, and drop it into a cooler for transport to the testing facilities in the campus’s shiny, state-of-the-art Frank M. and Dorothea Henry Science Center.

I saw a guy do that the other day as he waited to cross 14th Street NW: just casually expectorate a globule into the gutter.

Critics have to say something, of course — and there is apparently plenty enough to say about “American Dirt” without requiring the author to expectorate into a test tube.