Definition: Any word that doesn't appear in the dictionary, but should.
This is a word that appeared in the 1980's, because of actor/comedian Rich Hall. I heard about this word from one of his appearances on QI, which I love. He generally acts like a bit of an idiot, but he's more than that. When he created this word, it was part of an ongoing series that he was working at, called 'Not Necessarily The News', and he would take a moment to read out some suggested sniglets that got mailed to him. From those letters, he created 3 books about sniglets, sharing the ones he thought were good. Below is a picture of one of the books, taken from the Meeple PhD link below.
In an interview about the sniglet books he wrote, he said this, which is copied from the Wikipedia link below. I'm not fond of using them as a source, but I liked this quote too much to ignore. Rich Hall got asked if Sniglets were just for comedy, and this is what he said back.
Yeah. Well, no. I wouldn't say they're completely for comic value. I mean, I get letters from schools all the time saying how they've incorporated a sniglet book into their reading program. You can look at a lot of the words and sort of break them down into their etymological origins. And you can learn a lot about how and where words derive from. When you assign this frailty of human nature a word, then the word has to work. It has to either be a hybrid of several other words, or have a Latin origin, or something.[12]
From the same Wikipedia Article, here are some examples of Sniglets:
- Aquadextrous: possessing the ability to turn the bathtub faucet with the toes.
- Castcaspers: dead actors who appear on television.
- Chwads: discarded gum found beneath tables and countertops.
- Essoasso: One who swerves through a service station to avoid a red light.
- Icelanche: When ice at the bottom of an upturned glass suddenly moves toward the mouth as one attempts to finish drinking the liquid.
- Jokesult: When someone insults you, you call them on it, and they say, "It was just a joke."
- Premblememblemation: The act of checking that a letter is in a mailbox after it has been dropped.
- Snackmosphere: the pocket of air found inside snack and/or potato chip bags.
- Terma helper: The extra verbiage used to stretch a 600-word essay to the required 1000.
- Toboggan hagen: a large ice cream sundae.
- Eyes-Hockey: The substance found in the corner of your eye in the morning.
- Pursabyss: where unrecovered belongings reside within a woman's handbag.
It got suggested that the creation of sniglets might be a good lesson in schools to show kids how to create and use language, and so they might understand better the already laid out language, but I don't know how often it actually comes up.
I might be weird for this and I know I don't have many readers right now, but since it'll be around for a while, I might get takers later. Anyone have a sniglet they want to share? An idea for a word we need but don't have? Think about it, you might have a fun word to share that you can't think of now.
Either way though, don't you love how flexible language is? It changes to fit what we need so easily.
If you want to know more about Sniglet or don't think it's a real word or something, there are links below discussing it. I'm not thrilled to use Wikipedia for it, but it had some good stuff this time.
Sources:
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