Sniglets

I grew up reading Sniglets books. A Sniglet is any word that doesn't appear in the dictionary but should. Voit-lock occurs when a basketball becomes wedged between the backboard and the rim; Cheetle is the orange substance that coats your fingers after eating a bag of Cheetoes; Brattled is the unsettling feeling, at a stoplight, that the busload of kids that just pulled up beside you is making fun of you.

Sniglets are the brainchild (hate that word) of Rich Hall, an undersung member of one of those early-80s SNL casts headlined by folks like Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy. Either my brother or me would get the new Sniglets book and/or calendar each Christmas. My childhood friend would make fun of me when he saw these books; they were so Porter he would say; I was never sure what he meant at the time but now I do. He meant that the Sniglets' brand of humor was the perfect match for our comedic preferences: funny yet inoffensive and middlebrow and in no way edgy or challenging. Much like the more successful Sniglets' contemporary, The Far Side, another Porter Family favorite. Maybe that's not the best example; The Far Side was actually kinda subversive, but you get the idea. So maybe he had it half-right. The truth lies somewhere in the middle; my dad also owned a copy of Richard Pryor's That Nigger's Crazy. Wish I told him that.

In any case, frying an egg is what got me thinking about Sniglets. I thought of a great Sniglet: Egglad: The outermost, albumenic portion of a fried egg which transmutes into a brittle, diaphanous, clingwrap-like material after cooking. Don't you hate that part of a fried egg? It's edible, but you don't want to eat it, do you?