Sploot

July 10, 2023

Greetings from the persnickety,

Recently someone sent me an email with a link to a story in which they thought I would be interested. I rarely follow up on these sorts of things since I am told this is what leads to having your identity stolen. Or perhaps a Nigerian prince sends you fifteen million dollars. Either way, it gave me pause.

In this case, even though I trusted the sender, (in spite of her use of a dangling preposition) I didn’t bother with it because the subject line had a questionable word in it. When I say ‘questionable’, I don’t mean it was vulgar, I mean it wasn’t a word.

I have an opinion about most things, which might surprise you since I am usually quiet about expressing them. My reticence is not due to shyness, or because I am polite. It is because my opinion has often been riddled with ill-conceived philosophy and suspicious facts, which I am loathe to update. A long way of saying I’m fusty.

One opinion I have that is not wrong is that we should not use words that are not words. It is, as pundits often say for the wrong reasons, a slippery slope. This slope, as slippery as a lubricious declivity, would likely lead to the degradation of the English language, which while only spoken by a slim percentage of the planet, is my native tongue and therefore sacrosanct.

I don’t think I’m alone in this opinion (hence my courage in expressing it) and yet someone, possibly an English-speaking person, invented the word ‘sploot’.

One cannot simply invent a word and throw it pell-mell into the ether and expect it to be adopted or understood by the population. I realize this is a penchant of younger people and some musicians and a few politicians who can’t help but fabricate, but speaking for the rest of us, it is a direction with which we cannot put up. (Note the crafty way I avoided the dangling preposition and made the sentence more awkward. It’s a dying art.)

These words are commonly used by young adults: Sus. Yeet. Smol. Boujee. Flumpnugget. Rizz. Cheugy. How do Gen Z people play scrabble? It’s anarchy! It’s cray-cray!

If you hear a word on NPR, you give it some credibility. I mean if a three-year-old said ‘sploot’ you would say how cute it was and give her a piece of watermelon. And then you would correct her in some mild way, and perhaps later silently judge her parents for allowing such gibberish.

But journalists are supposed to be the guardians of established standards in communication.

So, that leads us to splooting. (Admit it, you never thought you’d see the day when that sentence would exist. Imagine David Brinkley turning to Chet Huntley, and saying “So, that leads us to splooting.”) NPR published a story about the environment, that somehow involved animals that sploot.

It turns out that when the climate is changing, (‘changing’ being the neutral way observers can avoid saying ‘global warming’) in this case getting warmer, some animals are not able to stay cool. And so, they lay down on their bellies on the cool earth (still warming, but cool). Bears do it. Squirrels do it. Dogs do it. Somehow this should end with “…let’s fall in love.”, a reference for the really fogey flumpnuggets.

These animals lay splayed on the damp soil, to cool their bellies and be more comfortable. Of course, let’s just call that splooting. Why not? Nobody is using the letters arranged in that particular order, so it makes perfect sense. While we are at it, let’s call eating an ice cream cone ‘snargling’. It’s not like communicating ideas clearly is important.

I daresay that a lot of the words in this essay sent you to the dictionary, which was intentional on my part. (For Gen Z’s, a dictionary is a book with all the acceptable words in our language and their definitions. Uh… a ‘book’ is a printed work of writing, bound in ... never mind.)

I realize that all words were invented at some point, and that evolution practically demands that we grow the language to keep up with changes in society. But somehow there has to be some sort of standard, some method of filtering the dross and chaff that flies out of some people’s mouths (not talking about just politicians here) and choose not to simply accept everything spoken as a new word.

Even as I write this, I realize how ludicrous, and outdated, this sounds. Every generation has created its own slang, and some of it sticks and some fade away. Language has always been fluid, and now with the ability to communicate anything instantly to big audiences, it will simply take on new dimensions. I get it, but I still get to stir the pot a little.

Some people are worried about artificial intelligence taking over, and it occurs to me that perhaps it already has, it just comes from us.

Hope this finds you choosing your words carefully,

David

Copyright © 2023 David Smith