Snurl...

Recently I came across a post on Facebook that I find to be wonderful (Thank you, MB 😁).  It isn’t one of those inspirational ones or one of the clever statements you find on a Word Porn post. (Pause here. I cannot figure out, for the life of me, why that site is called WordPorn. (Check it out at WordPorn.com. It is a site where people share literary content, from all sorts of places, that deals with writing.)  Does anyone know why it is called that?)  Anyway – this friend of mine occasionally posts from a site called Grandiloquent Word of the Day. Now I have no idea how many of you find words to be interesting on several different levels, but I, for one, like to take them out and play with them.

So – the grandiloquent word in this particular post was snurl or snirl –pronounced [snurl].  It makes me laugh even before I say it. You can also say it three times real fast and that’s fun. I am thinking that some of you tried to do that just now.  Anyway -- picture the word and beside the definition is a woman snurling - in the sense of the first definition below. To add to the charm, the picture is in sepia as are all these posts… perfect color to feature old timey stuff. 

The word snurl is defined in two ways – both verbs… but I checked… snurl may also be a noun.  So glad about that.

                             Snurl or Snirl:

            1.   To turn up one’s nose in scorn

            2.   To curl up, twist, snort, wrinkle (I particularly love the snort part…)

Now one of my grandmas had perfected the snurl. She was a master.  In fact, I think she looked at a lot of things with disgust, derision and/or contempt.  Her smiles were rare, and I didn’t spend much time trying to make her smile. I think I was a bit afraid of her… walked a wide circle around her. She yelled the word “hark!” a lot when all her grandchildren were little, and it took me more than half a century to realize that meant “listen” as in Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. (Sometimes it takes me a while to figure out things.)  She was little, but sort of scary. She had not had an easy life, plus her knees and feet always hurt.  It’s a shame really that she could not see past the hard times to when times were better... and they were.  Then again – maybe she just didn’t like little kids. I doubt that though. Hmm… too late to worry about it now. Some things cannot be changed.  Some people are just “snurly” (snurly is not a word by the way… at least not in my spell check)

Moving on -- I, personally, snurl.  I snurl illogically at foods that I have never ever even tried to eat – like escargot or cottage cheese.  Then there is cream cheese… just don’t like the consistency, and it was rarely available in my house when I was growing up so I never tried it when sometimes forced to try things as a child.  We were butter and peanut butter people. I still am. Then again… a lot of political shenanigans also bring out a hearty snurl from me as do freshly fertilized fields in the spring and summer.  If you are a city folk, you may not have experienced the particular “delight” of freshly fertilized fields or of driving behind a manure spreader on a country road… snurl worthy for sure. Trust me on that. Some things you don’t need to personally experience to know that they smell bad – like politics -- or fertilized fields.  Actually, I just realized that political game playing and fresh fertilizer have a lot in common really and both are snurl worthy.

Thought: as we find our way through these times, what if we become an entire country/world of snorting snurlers? (Snurlers is not a word either, but you know what I mean.) I so hope that doesn’t happen. It’s not an attractive look…ever. Actually, a hearty snurl often contributes to a problem. That's never good.