Ugh, we were seated in a restaurant last week right next to a table with a family with three kids who were snorking and snotting. One was less than a metre from me. Just what I wanted: to catch a respiratory virus. It also didn’t make for the pleasantest dining experience soundscape.
OK, now, question, though. I like to use “snorking and snotting” to describe a certain thing, and I suppose not everyone uses that turn of phrase, but you know what I mean, right? For snotting one could say “blowing the nose and sniffling,” perhaps – the idea, anyway, is ‘producing a lot of mucus’. But snorking, now: is there another word that conveys that quite as well? If asked to define it, would you come up with a string of words, or would you just demonstrate: “sssnnoorrrrkkkkkk!”
Because it’s not simply sniffing or sniffling, is it. It’s inhaling loudly through the nasal passages for the purpose of swallowing loose mucus. It’s a common enough thing for people with head colds to do – especially the youth and any other uncouth. And yet our vocabulary for exactly that act is broadly wanting. Perhaps because it’s disgusting.
But people do snork, and we need to name it from time to time. So it’s odd to me that I rarely see the word snork. It’s not a new word. Aside from being imitative, and having the /sn/ phonaestheme that is so commonly associated with things nasal, it’s been in the language for centuries, though not strictly referring just to that gross ingression of catarrh. It’s attested in the OED from the 1500s meaning ‘snore’ and from the 1800s meaning ‘snort, grunt, breathe noisily’.
That is certainly broader than what I have in mind here. ‘Snort, grunt, breathe noisily’ puts me in mind of the eponymous vagrant in the song “Aqualung” by Jethro Tull, so named because of his noisy breathing (including, as specified in the lyrics, snot). But this is not quite aqualung territory. It’s more like… a snorkel, I guess.*
But, really, what other word could you use that would be equal? I’d be tempted to use sknx but it’s canonically a snore (and, almost unique among English words, strictly requires an ingressive airstream). Snorking (in the sense I mean) and snoring are produced by almost exactly the same means, though. Only, ironically, while a snore is somnolent, it is the snork that is more phlegmatic. Which is, for all the subtle gradations, a gross distinction.
*By the way, snorkel comes from German Schnorchel, which first named an exhaust pipe for diesel-powered submarines; it is formed from the same root – with the same meaning – as snore, which is also the most likely etymon of snork.
Sesquiotica 