snooze

Oops, sorry, took a little long to write this one. I guess I was snoozing… Well, I snoozed, I losed. No, wait: I snost, I lost. No, that doesn’t work either…

Funny—we’ve had the expression “You snooze, you lose” (at first more often seen as “If you snooze, you lose” or “When you snooze, you lose”) since the early 20th century, especially gaining in popularity starting in the 1960s and ’70s, but no one ever seems to want to look back at past occasions of snoozing and losing. Couldn’t English have been good enough to give us a strong past tense form of snooze?

It would help if we could sniff out where the word came from. It seems to have just snuck into the language while we were all sleeping. Its first known use in print is from the 1700s; Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists a 1753 entry from a glossary of cant (thieves’ lingo): “The Cull is at Snoos; The Man is asleep.” The snooze spelling showed up 30 years later. Etymology? The Oxford English Dictionary shrugs and says “apparently a cant or slang word of obscure origin.” Merriam-Webster says simply “origin unknown.” Green’s offers “[? SE snore + doze].”

Wiktionary seems just slightly more helpful: “Unknown. Compare Dutch snoezelen (‘to snooze’) or snusa (‘to snore lightly’).” Hmm… if I look at the entry for snoezelen it says “Blend of snuffelen (‘to sniff’) +‎ doezelen (‘to doze’)” but gives no indication there of how old the word is. And a bit of searching seems to indicate that the word was first seen in the early 1980s, and is associated mainly with a kind of sensory therapy. So it’s not the source of the word snooze… quite possibly the reverse.

Well, fine. We have snooze. And we like snooze. It has a certain snugness and a sound of snoring, doesn’t it? And that comfy buzz of dozing (perhaps with the aid of booze). Sometimes of dozing through a buzzer, too – thanks to the Snooze button on your clock radio (or similar device). I wouldn’t say it oozes comfort, but only because oozing is kind of a gross image – more like one you would choose for some loser schmoozing on a cruise.

There’s nothing so louche about snoozing; it’s simply somnolent. It’s true, it axiomatically entails missing opportunities – if you zone out, you get zoned out – but it doesn’t get you into trouble, either… or into any other indulgence. As my brother once said, “Try the sleep diet: you snooze, you lose. No pain, no gain!” Well, verily did I snooze, and yea, I did lose… time, anyway.