some Vivid Verbs--mostly Monosyllabic

Many English-language verbs are either onomatopoetic or so suggestive-sounding that you want to stop, look at them and bring them into your working vocabulary. Let me give you about ten here and in the next essay, and see which you like: (1) peenge; (2) snirtle; (3) swabble; (4) snite; (5) squidge; (6) gride; (7) spae; (8) perflate; (9) impetrate; and (10) knurl.

To The Words

(1) Peenge, of obscure origin, is/was a word used primarily in the north of England or Scotland to mean "whine" or "complain." The OED also suggests a meaning of "mope" or "fret." In 1993 the Glasgow Herald ran an article in which it talked about the Scottish propensity to complain. "Take the concept of complaining, an activity at which Scots excel. Complain can be translated as compleen, murn..peenge, pewl, peek." Speaking of pewl, the "normal" spelling of the world is pule, which means to "pipe plantively, as a chicken, or the young of any animal," or, with respect to humans "to cry in a querulous tone; whine; whimper." But a quotation using pule stimulates another word: "Drivers who would rather mince and mewl and pule about low pay rather than standing up to say they're quitting." To mewl, means to "mew" like a cat, to whimper like a baby or to make whining noises. From the Village Voice in 1992: "'Help me,' the president mewled." Peenge is also seen as an alternative expression for whinge, which means "to whine; esp. to complain peevishly." "A little beggar boy...whinging and shivering with cold." Thus, one word has really led us to four: whinge, pule, mewl and peenge. A great quartet of words suggestive of ways to whine and complain is here.

(2) Snirtle is a variant of snortle, and means to "snicker" or "laugh in a suppressed manner." A synonymn also is "to snigger." Robert Burns has the following memorable line: "But though his little heart did grieve.. He feigned to snirtle in his sleeve." There is also a verb "to snirt" which means the same as "to snirtle," and a snirt is a suppressed laugh or snicker. But there really seems to be a difference between snirtling and snortling. The latter, related to snorting, is making a characteristic loud or harsh sound by violently driving breath through the nostrils--esp. when excited or frightened. I think that if you snirtle, you drive breath through your nostrils but not so violently as when you snortle. A guffaw, on the other hand, is when you laugh noisily by expressing the air through the mouth. So here we also have a bundle of words: snirtle, snicker, snirt, snigger snortle and guffaw. And just think, those are only two of the orifices out of which air can quickly escape.

(3) While on snirtle, let's move down the page to snite, which means to wipe the nose; to cast away mucus. It appears also to have a more specialized meaning in the OED: to clear the nose from mucus esp. by means of the thumb and finger only. Gee, I wish I knew the word decades ago, since I knew tons of people, mostly guys, who dispensed with the trouble of bringing handkerchiefs with them and regularly snited in grade school. As you can tell, snite relates to snout, which relates to snot. I really think I have had enough of this stuff for now.

(4) So, let's move on to squidge, a word that means "to squeeze" or "to press together, so as to making a sucking noise." But, it also has a technical meaning in tiddlywinks--to play a wink by snapping it with a larger counter. So, in a tiddlywinks rule book (did you know that one of these existed?), you have, "No player may squidge another's wink." I think that ought to have been put on the entrance to Dante's Hell. Instead of "Abandon Hope, All You Who Enter," which is too gruesome and too literal in meaning, one should have had something like "No player may squidge another's wink." Instead of Jesus' reference to the great commandment (to love God and neighbor), my great commandment is now, "Don't squidge another's wink." But if we put away our excitement and return to its more general meaning, we have such phrases/sentences to bring the word alive: "Waiting for the day when lunch will be a blob of something squidged out of a tube," and, from 1971, "The leeches were at me...I squidged them underfoot." John Steinbeck used the word in Grapes of Wrath: "The children squidged their toes in the red dust." Thus, whenever you did your feet into the sand on the beech, or try to fit yourself on the couch with five other people, be aware that you are squidging yourself. I suppose you could do something more harmful to yourself...

(5) We understand swabble if we understand that a swab is utensil, such as a mop, for cleaning something, especially on the deck of a ship. The OED tells us it means "to make a noise like that of water moved about." It derives from a German word meaning "to be agitated, to sway about, or make the sound of splashing water."

Conclusion

Let's conclude with a bonus word, not on the list of 10 words given at the beginning. It is squizzle. We see "squeeze" behind the word, and indeed, that is the proper place to be looking. To squizzle is to "squirt out, to squish." Its first usage in English was in 1856: "When the mouth is filled with the luscious fruit, and the..sweet though embarrassing juice is squizzling out all over the chin, and shirt-bosom." Boots squeak and "squizzle" in the mud. I like the vividness of the 1856 quotation, and can even imagine it now, as I long for summer to come along with many nights of eating watermelon...

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