Snuzzle -- is Google reliable?

Beverly Flanigan flanigan at OHIOU.EDU
Mon Dec 9 19:23:01 UTC 2002


Whether on Google or not, I like the blend I used with my son when he was a
baby:  "Let's huggle."

At 01:26 AM 12/9/2002 -0700, you wrote:
>A colleague the other day told me that he had heard someone on NPR use the
>word "snuzzle", and though he found it highly expressive and
>interpretable, said he had never heard it before, and wondered if I had.
>It is familiar to me as a sort of combination of "snuggle" and "nuzzle"
>(cf. also Jimmy Durante), typical of a cat burying its head in one's arm,
>but out of curiosity I thought I'd take a look at Google, which is often
>cited herein. It turned up 496 hits, but in checking out the first 150, I
>found that about 145 of them concerned themselves with some series of toy
>ponies (one even had a picture on his website) which seem to provoke the
>most awful sentimental expressions from their owners. Of the 5 or so hits
>which were not, several concerned sentimental doggerel about owners' cats,
>which indulged in this activity, and only one, a website for Chambers
>publications (dictionary, encyclopedia), focused on this as a language
>item, including it in their "list of our favorite odd words" (which for
>some reason would not print out from my screen). Maybe if I had taken time
>to look at all 496 hits (slow, on my 56K modem connection), I would have
>found three or four more of linguistic relevance.
>
>         This leaves me wondering how usefully reliable hit statistics on
>Google are sometimes.
>
>         Rudy



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