Squunched.

In last night's Snow Walk Café, I wrote:

I love trying to read a book in Kindle — after hours of reading this and that on the web — and arriving at a word — in this case “squunched” — clicking on it and, via Google, escaping back onto the web, going here and there, liberated by “squunched,” defying the order of things once again, not reading a book, unless you call that reading a book. But I will squunch myself back in there, in that Kindle book, just playing at trying to read until I see the sign for the next off ramp.

What I was reading was — as mentioned yesterday — "The Suffering Channel" (found in this collection):

They often liked to get two large tables squunched up together near the door, so that those who smoked could take turns darting out front to do so in the striped awning’s shade.

When you take the off ramp marked Squunch, you get to a discussion of another sentence by the same author, and I have that other book in Kindle too and can tell you "squunch" comes up in 3 sentences. Taking a gander at the first of the 3 sentences should give you a feeling for why I read fiction looking for off ramps.

1. "On the counter of an old sink the same not-quite white as the floor and ceiling (the wallpaper is a maddening uncountable pattern of roses twined in garlands on sticks) on the counter are an old splay-bristled toothbrush, tube of Gleem rolled neatly up from the bottom, unsavory old NoCoat scraper, rubber cement, NeGram, depilatory ointment, tube of Monostat not squeezed from the bottom, phony-beard whiskerbits and curled green threads of used mint floss and Parapectolin and a wholly unsqueezed tube of diaphragm-foam and no makeup but serious styling gel in a big jar with no lid and hairs around the rim and an empty tampon box half-filled with nickels and pennies and rubber bands, and Joelle sweeps an arm across the counter and squunches everything over to the side under the small rod with a washcloth wrung viciously out and dried in the tight spiral of a twisted cord, and if some items do totter and fall to the floor it is all right because everything eventually has to fall." Page 236.

2. "When Pat’s phone rings and Gately leaves, McDade’s squunching his upper lip up in his hand and asking people about acquaintance with cleft palates." Page 596.

3. "One of the falls in Mr. Schtitt’s room had been on the burnt hip, and squunched salve from the bandage is starting to darken the corduroys at that side of the pelvis, though there is zero pain." Page 756.

I had to put that below the jump so readers wouldn't run off and not read the rest of this morning's posts, one of which also has a jump to protect me from your possible aversion. But since you've made the jump, you've decided to take a reading off ramp, and that gives me a lot of freedom not to worry about boring you.

But to get out of Kindle and back to the off ramp I took googling "squunched," the first hit was to a post on a blog called Definitive Jest ("Definitive Jest is a vocabulary-building and SNOOT-approved word-of-the-day blog centered around David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest"). The blogger, Jarett Myskiw (miscue?) only spoke about sentence #3, above. He deemed the word "a neologism" and proceeded to look for other words with the strange "UU." It's funny to think there are so few words with a double U when we have a whole letter, W. "Vacuum" is the obvious one. Next is "continuum," but then you're probably stuck if you're just coming up with words out of your head. Maybe "residuum." Or did you get "weltanschauung"? There's also "muumuu" and to return as closely as possible to squunch, "squush." I'll bet you say or at least hear "squush" and it sounds fine, but if you had to write it, you'd balk at the double U.

Anyway, what fascinates me in my little google search is that David Foster Wallace does not get credit for the first use of "squunch." There's another Wallace who got there first, my personal favorite Wallace, Wallace Shawn. This is not from my favorite movie ("My Dinner With Andre"), but from a 1992 play, "The Fever":

And then when the paper and the ribbon were undone and removed, and the box itself, with its smooth surface like clear milk, was finally revealed, someone would take off the top of the box, and you would hear at that moment a little rustling or nestling sound, like the sound of a hamster moving in its cage, and that would be the sound of all the tiny little pieces of squunched-up paper that filled the box giving a sort of quiet little sigh as the taking off of the top of the box gave them some sudden extra breathing space. And then the most exciting part of the opening would start, which was the attempt to find out what in particular was inside the box aside from all the pieces of squunched-up paper, if in fact there was anything else inside there at all, because at first you always thought, Well, really, this time there is nothing else....

"Infinite Jest" came out in 1996, so "The Fever" has a 4-year jump. And yet, I have discovered "Troddledums, The Simian" — from 1879!

Click to enlarge: He caught him with a rapid wrench/And squunched him underneath a bench.

That's a very early comic strip! That's 6 years before "The Yellow Kid"!

But I've been limiting my search to "squunched." I've been squunched, it seems. If we enlarge our vistas to "squunch," we find this wonderful entry in The Dictionary of American Regional English, based on a survey taken in the years 1965 to 1970, asking Americans what word they use for: "To Move Over—For Example On A Long Bench: 'We Have To Make Room For One More. Can You ________ (A Little)?'"

There are so many words! One is "squunch over." It, like most words on the list, got mentioned exactly once. "Slide over," "scoot over," "move over," and "shove over" dominated. Those are all what we'd recognize as real words. When you get to the 10-vote level, you get the odd but obviously good "scrooch over" and "scooch over." "Squunch over" shared popularity with weird things like "scrooge over," "scrunch up," "mooch over a little," "hooch along," and "gooch down."

And there's this from "An Introduction to the Study of Language" by Leonard Bloomfield from 1914:

Going back a few more years, we find "squunch" in a poem in a 1909 issue of The Atlantic Monthly — a parody of Walt Whitman on the subject of spring:

The little boy feels it as he hurries to the kindergarten; the typewriter girl feels it squunch round her new Oxford ties; the greasy immigrant feels it as he slouches with his dinner-pail toward the quarry; the broker — his lips still warm with the good-by kiss of his wife - feels it.

I feel the Spring in every atom of my terrestrial being....

It's not spring here. It's very cold. 5 below. A great day for drinking ice water straight from the tap, but I've been squunched up too long here inside. Enough traveling along the byways reached from the off ramp Squunch.

Time to get back on the highway of Real Life.