It's a sploodal world, after all!

Sploodal is one of those weird words that seems to suddenly appear out of nowhere and instantly become part of our public consciousness. A meme if you will. Other examples would be words and expressions like "phat" and "the bomb" that everybody uses and understands, and yet nobody is really sure where they came from.

Theories, of course, abound. It is generally agreed that "sploodal" first appeared in northern Europe sometime in the late 1990s, and one theory is that it derived from the Norwegian word "sblødl" (a rather mild, yet tasty, firm white cheese). Why a Norwegian word for cheese should come to be associated with all things cool, hip and desirable, however, has never been adequately explained, except perhaps for the suggestion that it was originally used ironically and that non Norwegian listeners simply didn't get the joke.

Another theory is that the word is actually a shortened form of the phrase "split poodle", which is slang for a particular sexual position, the details of which I won't go into here (feel free to look it up if you must, but this is a family friendly blog). Although this theory does appeal to our more prurient natures (remember the theory a while back that the word "nice" originally meant "sexually promiscious"?), one major flaw in this theory is that in almost all cases the word has, in fact, been spelled "Sploodal" and not "sploodle". It is possible, of course, that the spelling of the final syllable was purposely altered in order to make the word's origins a bit more obscure to one's parents, but I think that's stretching things a bit too much, personally.

One final theory that has been making the rounds lately is that the word derives from "splood," which is an obscure term describing a certain type of "ornithological dejecta" (that's bird poop to the rest of us). This is almost certainly a coincidence, however, since the term really is truly obscure, even among ornithologists, and no evidence has ever been presented showing how the term might have crossed over into the mainstream.

Regardless of the word's origin, it's clear that sploodal has officially entered the language as the current "hot" word of the decade. Whether it will become a permament part of our lexigraphic landscape (along with such winners as "hip" and "cool"), or eventually fade away (like "gnarly" before it), remains to be seen. Only time will tell. But in the mean time, I'm going to have one sploodal of a good time!