The Post About the Joy of Being Snogged

On the occasion, Dear Reader, we here in the PB&J room are quietly and desperately overwhelmed by our own use of vocabulary that generally falls into what some grammarians would euphemistically denote as “the crap pile.”
This could include such vocab as neologisms, spoonerisms, misspelled words which we decide look cool any way so we keep them despite their overt misspellingness, hyphenated words which do not normally incite a hyphen and words that are shortened for either time’s or brevity’s sake.

While there are numerous examples of this phenom in some of our previous postings, let us direct our Dear Reader’s attention in particular to a post entitled “The Post About How Cool We Thought We Were.”

For the most part this is an innocuous if intrepidly inane post regarding a playful conjoining of mouse to moose to mousse to propel our Dear Reader towards a short bemusing albeit bathetic remembrance of hair gel and poseurs in puffy padded jackets from the 80’s. The 1980’s, that is.

And yes, some vocabulary was created and harmed in the forming of this post, eg., “80’snish” as an adjective. However, “80’snish” is not the harmed vocabulary this post is intended to direct attention towards. We gather here now today (or when tomorrow, depending on when you opt to and/or are compelled to even though you do not want to read this post) to discuss a verb/adverb and its implications that our beloved better Seven/Eighths tossed around, tossed as one would a dwarf in an outlawed bar contest or as a carnivore would a lovely kale and endive with roasted almonds salad, topped with just a hint of strawberry vinaigrette.

We give you, for your dire and dear consideration, the award-winning Verb of the Year in the Year of Our Lord 2007, aka the prized-in-certain-uncertain-circles VYYOL (pronounced “Vile”), (a prize awarded annually by the Vhiehussan Enigmatic Rowdy Battery – a splinter group - as you no doubt know - of the MLA, which language association did put out a couple of covert operation-style hit jobs - still on the PQ, still on the DL for most mercenary’s lists on the presiding leader of the V.E.R.B., an obsessive-compulsive linguistic freak of nature who goes by the seditious nomiker, Meister Morphology (although his actual name is Lionel Spludronk, a mild-mannered obsessive-compulsive actuary from Acquired Taste, Alabama, which position in life would have been lived completely beneath the radar in his homestead, population 1,458, had it not been for his association with the nefarious nee nearly fatal branches of the Modern Language Association) – (see www.verbtryst.com for previous winners)), Snog.

We would like to be perfectly clear in this: to snog is not at all to snipe. Neither, under any circumstances, should snogging be confused with the ubiquitous form of Dutch dance, clogging.
To misinterpret the act of snog as a modern-day translation of Lewis Carroll’s Snark, said snark which is still being hunted (which, oh by the way, is not the same thing at all as “snipe hunting,” a fun and festive trick to play on rookie hunters), would be erroneous on the part of the interpreter, hence the ‘mis.’ It will also be noted that if you use a snog, which you cannot do because there is no such thing as a snog for heaven’s sake (that would be like stuttering “why just t-t-t-today we were ea-ea-eating a bowl of ambulate while we p-p-p-poured some disambiguate into a glass and read the d-d-d-d-daily edition of the local engender”), you are not necessarily using a snark, a punctuation mark meant to denote certain messages as being derogatory or ironic. The snark, in this case, is also known as a sarcasm mark, often disparagingly and conversely denoted as a tilde or a plus sign. Something that snogging is not also known as – a sarcasm mark. We’re just saying. Now, if you snog (which by definition would be nigh on to physically impossible) this is not at all to say that you have shortened a verb of another sort and snogged where or when you meant to snoggle, which is probably the New Guinea or Antartican or Nova Scotian way to pronounce ‘snuggle.’ We will reinforce the notion that snog is not at all to be misinterpreted as an anagram for ‘song,’ nor as a palindrome for ‘gons,’ short in some bass-ackward locker rooms for ‘gonads’ when obviously ‘nads’ is the correct and etiquettely proper abbreviation. And finally, no, one cannot drip snog out of one’s nose nor swallow it – whether accidentally or purposefully - during a particularly congested time as snog is quite obviously not a green or heaven forbid a brown gooey noun but is instead a verb and yes, one cannot drip or swallow a verb, no matter the quality of either its greenness nor its inherent gooeyness.

We would like to iterate, as we think we have already mentioned this, that snogging in and of itself is not inherently gooey. Or chewy. Or dewy. It can be and has been green (and that’s not easy) on occasions but see The Post About Giving Green a Chance to determine why we here in the PB&J room do not claim an original greenness for our snogging. Most likely, we began to snog at approximately the same time as everyone else began snogging, sometime after the gas lines began to form and after root-‘em-toot-‘em shoot-‘em-up video games replaced teddy bears as the gift du jour for four year olds and after the proliferation of uncensored cable channels virused themselves across the globe and probably after the final veils were dropped from the illusion that the government is for the people and by the people and probably before our population had so spiraled out of control that enforced birth control became a real possibility and the definition between life and death was intentionally fuzzied because less is better in the eyes of some (whew!), so after all that but before our soapbox crashed from the weight of our unsolicited opining on the cultural and spiritual downfall of what is now termed as humanity. Ahem.

We would like to leave you with a close approximation of what it is to be snogged or to snog someone else (which is not akin at all to snubbing someone else, Dear Reader) through the powerful tool of enumerating what snog, snogging, to be snogged is not.. Incidentally and a propos of nothing whatsoever ‘akin’ is not at all akin to ‘akimbo,’ no matter-o how much-o one would want-o it to be-o so. However, and also a propos of nothing again, one can be akimbo when one chooses to do a clog-o dance. Oh. Which is to mention nothing of choosing to unclog-o the drain-o. Oh my.

But we digress.
When you are snogged, you are not schnookered, although when you are schnookered, you might at times feel as though you are snogged – do not confuse the two!!! There is no such thing as being snoggered and if there were it would not be like being schnookered. Never was the question asked, “To snogger or not to snogger?” which was the question. Twasn’t asked because i’twasn’t nobler in the mind to sling the snoggering arrows at the snoggering friends and Romans and countrymen who might have lent an ear. If said ear had not already been snoggered in, resulting in a gooey, dewy wet willie.

This of course all comes back around to something our mother told us repeatedly during our childhood. We would sit patiently at her knee, hearing her soothing voice, well, we would do this when we weren’t running around the place like a demon hellion on a mid-60’s form of child-crack probably known as kool-aid or homemade chocolate chip cookies eaten by the handful. Ah, it is amusing how no matter the perspective distance gives one on the notion of ‘simply times’ one tends to long for said times anyway, despite their difficulties and hardships. It sometimes causes us to deeply sigh.

Which has absolutely zero to do with something our mother told us repeatedly during our childhood.
Which has even less to do with how boondoggling, how absolutely snoggling the way the world doth rotate in its quirks sometimes can be.

So it goes.

The Post About How Cool We Thought We Were

It’s not a far stretch, Dear Reader, from mice to moose.
Why would one care about the stretch, you ask, from mice to moose?
That is a very good question, we say, one of those so very good questions that it does not have a ready answer.
But let us just say, one cares because one does, because it is the right thing to do. Especially if Santa is watching.

Here’s where our explorations have lead us so far: the plural of moose, best that we can ascertain, is moose, so unlike its fraternal brother, the mouse, the moose has no qualms with how to multiply its name, unless we want to bring mousse into the subject, be it chocolate or hair, which upon reflection we decidedly do not. Want to do.

Because, of course, the plural of mousse is…..mousse.

And but then there’s the whole hair issue. Or lack thereof. For some of us here in the PB&JRoom.
And but then, there’s the whole 80’snish of mousse. Yes, when we had the Pony haircut and flipped our hair to the tunes of Alphaville and Human League and Ultravox and Japan on Modern Monday Night at N’Cahoots, well then, yes, we used mousse. Extensively. Like we had stock in the company. Like the brightness of the dayglo cans made the foamy crap inside more effective. (It did not, but you, Dear Reader, were probably smart enough even then to already know that: some of us, alas, were not). Like pounding the gel and the dippity-doo all over the head was not “hold” enough which is why mousse was spattered on top of gel and dippity-doo or brylcream. This, incidentally, produces – as if you do not already know – a shellacking effect on the hair and surrounding perimeters which might include but is not exclusive to the ears, the earrings, the shoulders, the puffy padded shoulders on the shirt, the eyebrows, the hair of anyone unfortunate enough to stand too near you whilst you high-steppingly sauntered and swayed nee boogied under your immovable doo. This shellack, unfortunately, did not wash out with simple shampoo and brillo-pads. One had to get out the industrial strength paint stripper to fully remove the concoction. Which removal you did, right before you reapplied the entire mess for the next big night out.

This is not meant to address the various extremities of the young wannabe in the 80’s but there’s this: does anyone quite get how hard it is to hold an “above it all but I want your attention so please ask me repeatedly what’s wrong so I can say ‘nothing’ or ‘you don’t get it, you just don’t get it’ repeatedly while I stand against the wall trying desperately to effect a James Dean pose” while one is wearing a white poofy shouldered waist jacket that even respecting matadors would pass on in the discount aisle, with one’s hair slowly gluing itself to the wall one has chosen as a prop for one’s leg-up too cool stance? Anyone??

Sometimes it simply snogs our brain.