Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig abuse.liquidweb.com. NS
Answer
abuse.liquidweb.com. 5 NS ns2.liquidweb.com.
abuse.liquidweb.com. 5 NS ns.liquidweb.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
ns.liquidweb.com. 5 A 69.16.222.254
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0