889. Splooting squirrels have taken the internet by storm. We look at where this fun word comes from and how far back it goes. Plus, I help you decide which title capitalization rules to follow.
889. Splooting squirrels have taken the internet by storm. We look at where this fun word comes from and how far back it goes. Plus, I help you decide which title capitalization rules to follow.
Transcript: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/whats-up-with-splooting-capitalizing-titles-momilltellya
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.
Today, we're going to talk about splooting, what a fascinating word “gender” is, and about all the tricky things to know about capitalizing words in headlines and titles.
What Is Splooting?
Splooting squirrels have taken over the internet the last couple of weeks. As temperatures soar, the poor little beasts are splaying out flat on the ground to try to cool off.
And squirrels aren’t the only animals that do it. Corgis seem to be particularly known for splooting — they are adorable little splooters — but all kinds of animals do it. I've seen pictures of splooting bears, cats, rabbits, and pigs, for example. I’ve also seen dog people call it "dog frogging" and "frog dogging" because it kind of looks like the way frogs sit with their legs all spread out. And the Washington Post reports that it is more commonly called “pancaking” in Britain.
So multiple people have asked me about the word "sploot." It sounds hilarious, and it's shown up in such serious and authoritative places as posts from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and articles in the Washington Post and The Guardian. So what's up with that? Is it actually a real word?
Well, it’s not a word you’ll find in biology journals. (I looked!) Biologists sometimes call it heat dumping. And you won’t find it in most official places like the Corpus of Contemporary English, the British National Corpus, the Oxford English Dictionary, or Merriam-Webster online. But the word actually has been around for more than a decade.
The oldest reference I could find for “splooting” being used this way — as opposed to being a word people occasionally used to describe spitting out liquid or something like that — was an Urban Dictionary entry from 2011 that talked about splooting corgis. The first use on Twitter was in mid-2012, also in reference to a corgi. And there’s a whole subreddit dedicated to pictures of animals splooting with 195,000 members that was created in 2015.
It looks to me like "splooting" is a term that came out of online animal culture, or at least was popularized there. These are the same circles where people call their dog’s foot pads "toe beans" and say their dogs have the "zoomies" when they frantically run around in circles. When I searched Google Books for the word “sploot,” one of the few hits I got was a 2019 book called “How to Speak Doggo.”
And one other hit was from a novel called “Pure Chocolate,” also published in 2019, that linked splooting to corgis again, talking about how dragons were splooting, probably because they picked it up from the corgis.
People have speculated that “sploot” is a combination of “splay” and “scoot” or “splay” and “scootch,” or that it may just be a funny way of saying “splat.” Nobody knows for sure, but turning “splat” into “sploot” seems like the most likely path to me because doggo-speak is a little heavy on the O’s. Besides doggos, you can also talk about pupperinos and woofers. And “bork” is a way of saying “bark,” and “cronch” is a way of saying “crunch,” just to give you a couple of examples. So “splat” to “sploot” doesn’t seem farfetched.
Splooting doesn’t look like a comfortable way for a human to cool down, unless maybe you’re more into yoga than I am, but getting as much of your body in contact with something cold does seem like it would feel good when the temperature hits 100 or higher.
And here are two fun tidbits I came across while researching this segment:
First, “corgi” is Welsh for “dwarf dog.” That’s fun.
And second, while I was trying to figure out how biologists talk about the way animals cool down, I discovered that birds can get really hot while they’re migrating, like you would if you were running a marathon, so some birds take lots of breaks, and other birds do things to fly where it’s cooler, like at higher altitudes or at night.
Gender
Last week, we talked about languages that are more gendered than English like German and Hebrew. (And I apologize for mispronouncing the Hebrew word “chaverot,” the word for a female friend. Thanks to Mark from Thornhill, Ontario, for writing in to let me know.) Well, while working on that piece, I discovered that the word “gender” didn’t originally have anything to do with being male or female. According to Etymonline, it originally meant “kind, sort, class, a class or kind of persons or things sharing certain traits.” It comes from the same root as the word “genre,” like you’d use to describe a kind of book, like science fiction or romance. And the root that gives us both those words gives a lot of other interesting words too, like “generation” (you’re part of a class of people born around the same time), “generic” (a general kind of thing), “general” actually (a broad idea or class of things), “genealogy” (the group of a family), and so on.
Capitalizing Titles
When you’re writing a title, you’re confronted with a shocking number of formatting options. How you decide to handle capitalization is up to you; it’s a style choice. But all the major style guides make recommendations. Here are some of the major styles I’ve seen:
Be Consistent
No matter which style you choose, the most important thing about title capitalization is to be consistent throughout your document or across your publications or website. And be realistic when choosing a style. For example, if you hire a lot of freelance writers or editors who are going to be writing their own headlines or subheads, it’s probably better to choose a simpler style that will be easy for everyone to follow.
Don’t Oversimplify
On the other hand, I do believe you can take simplification too far. For example, I’ve seen people use what I consider overly simplified styles such as capitalizing every letter of every word or keeping everything lowercase, even words that would normally be capitalized such as names. The Yahoo! Style Guide specifically recommends against these two styles. For example, they note that all caps can be difficult to read and some people equate all caps online with shouting.
And all lowercase is an incredibly informal style. It’s obviously common in social media posts, especially with younger people, so it could work on some super trendy sites, but I can’t see it being a good choice for most publications.
There’s Nothing Special About the Verb ‘Is’
One mistake I see people make a lot with headlines is treating forms of the verb “to be” as special, maybe because they are so short. In styles except sentence style, verbs are capitalized, and there’s nothing special about the verbs “is” and “was.” So if you’re capitalizing your verbs, you capitalize “is” and “was.”
Rewrite to Avoid Starting a Sentence with a Lowercase Name
One common question is how to handle headlines or titles that begin with a company name or product name that starts with a lowercase letter, such as “iPhone” or “eBay,” since every major headline style says you should capitalize the first letter of the headline. If you can, rewrite it so the word that needs a lowercase letter at the beginning is in the middle of the headline or title, and then write it as the companies want you to—in camel case, with a lowercase letter at the beginning and a capital letter in the middle.
If you can’t avoid having an iPhone- or eBay-type word at the beginning of your title, it’s up to you whether you keep the first letter lowercase. The Associated Press recommends capitalizing the first letter of the word in such cases, so you’d have both the I and the P capitalized in “iPhone” at the beginning of a headline.
Chicago, however, recommends just starting the title with the lowercase letter at the beginning of the product or company name.
Pick a Style for the Second Half of Hyphenated Words
Another common question is whether to capitalize the second part of a hyphenated word in a headline. Again, there are multiple styles. You just need to decide on one and be consistent. The style I use is that if I would capitalize the second part if it were a separate word in the title, then I capitalize it when it comes after a hyphen, which is essentially AP style.
Make a Decision and Stick with It
As you can see, there are a lot of decisions to make about headline and title styles. If your boss, editor, or teacher has a preferred style, you should use that; but if you are the master of your own universe, for example, an independent blogger, you’re free to choose any method. The important thing is that once you pick your style, stick with it.
Finally, I have a familect story from Rebecca.
"Hi. My name is Rebecca, and our word is ‘momlltellya.’ When we first moved to the North East after my dad was in the Air Force, we were driving past a big field of purple flowers, and one of us asked him, ‘What are those purple flowers?’ And he said, ‘They are purple momilltellyas,’ and so whenever we would see those purple flowers, whose name I have now actually forgotten. They were an invasive species, so I think they're gone now. We called them momilltellyas. ‘Oh, look at the momilltellyas,’ and of course it's spelled as if you were just mom-will-tell-ya, except without the W. Momilltellya. So momilltellyas are purple flowers, and darn, I can't remember what the actual name is. I actually did learn it at a later point in my life, but purple momilltellyas, the flower that grows in big fields. Thank you."
And Rebecca, of course, remembered the name right after she hung up, and called right back. We’ve all been there. They are called purple loosestrife, and they are definitely an invasive species. And thank you so much for the call. I can see lots of families finding the momilltellya name cute and useful.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to my editor Adam Cecil and my audio engineer Nathan Semes. Our ad operations specialist is Morgan Christianson, our digital operations specialist is Holly Hutchings, and our marketing and publicity assistant is Davina Tomlin, who finally finished crocheting their first sweater (and they say it fits and everything!) Good job, Davina.
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening.