Molotov Cartail

Back in the 1980s, there were a couple book collections of Sniglets (a “sniglet” being “any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary, but should”).  Looks like you can still buy the books and such from Amazon.

Several favorite sniglets remain in my personal vocabulary more than 25 years later, including “Alfred Hitchcooking” (repeatedly stabbing a block of frozen vegetables to make it cook faster), “arping” (moving your head in circles trying to read the label of a playing record), “Adam69” (two police cars facing opposite directions, exchanging information), and “Essoasso” (the person who cuts through a gas station in order to bypass a stoplight — guilty!).  I still have the original books somewhere, I think.

(Hmm, with the rise of cook-in-the-bag veggies, the demise of vinyl records, the old Adam-12 TV show being long out of circulation, and Esso being absorbed into ExxonMobil, those terms become way more obscure and less valuable as time goes by.)

Here are a couple web pages with lists of sniglets: one with many of the classics and one with new ones.

When I was in Las Vegas in August, though, I had dinner at the Palace Station casino and I parked next to this car.  I never thought I would see a “Molotov cartail” in the wild.  (That’s a car with a rag used in place of a missing gas cap, of course.)