Boop a Snoot! Cute Animal Language

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Emily. I’m calling from San Diego.

Hey, Emily, what’s going on?

What’s up?

So my friend got a cat recently, and I’ve been kind of vicariously living through him because it’s really his first cat.

And so he sent me a picture the other day of the cat, and he had left his tongue stuck out, like, after washing himself because they forget to put it away.

And I was like, oh, my God, that’s his first blep.

And he’s like, what? You haven’t heard of blep?

BLEPS are the internet name for when a cat, usually it kind of counts with dogs, they do it all the time, leaves their tongue out and it’s just kind of the comic book caption for this expression or action of theirs.

BLEP.

B-L-E-P, right?

A BLEP.

Yeah.

B-L-E-P.

And it’s kind of in the same family.

The more commonly known one is a boop.

Whether you touch an animal’s nose and you go boop or they touch something else with their nose, I feel like that has started.

Yeah.

I’ve seen it more in the real world, you know, booping.

Yeah, you boop a snoot.

Yeah, it’s not that it makes the sound boop, but it’s kind of the action itself.

And so blep is the name for the tongue being left out.

If you Google these things, you’ll see them all kind of associated.

So something like these onomatopoeia, is that what they would count as?

Some of them maybe.

I certainly the melm, M-L-E-M, when they do kind of a gentle licking, right?

Yeah, the licking, the melm-ing, that’s the third trio of these siblings of animals.

Like if a cat has food on his whiskers and he does the little gentle lick to get off, that’s a mlem-mlem-mlem.

How are you spelling that? M-L-E-M?

M-L-E-M, yeah.

It’s hard to say. I used to see it in writing.

Mlem-mlem and then blep. I love all those.

In my house, we agree that all dog snoots must be booped.

If they’ll let you boop them, you have to boop a snoot.

The boop.

So how long before these are in the dictionary?

What’s the barrier they cross over?

I don’t think it’ll be long in the scheme of language.

Maybe 10 years or so if they last.

I first noticed this kind of cutesy language becoming a little more regularized.

Because let’s face it, we all have cutesy language with our animals.

We have all these words that we use in the house for our relationships with our pets.

And sometimes we have our, you know, some pets in some houses have like 10 or 15 nicknames and they’re all kind of cutesy and fun and that sort of thing.

But the regularization of this kind of language first came to my attention for what it’s worth in 2005 with the Cute Overload website.

Do you remember this website?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I love that website.

It’s still up, but they stopped posting new content a couple of years ago, and it’s cute animals.

And they had all kinds of language.

One of my favorite was talking about tocks, the short for buttocks.

So the tocks of a little animal.

It’s cute little fuzzy behind, right?

And I think that’s where I first learned toe beans for the little pink.

Oh, yeah, the peas.

The bottoms of little cats’ feet.

Yeah, and if you go to the Cute Overload website, they still have a glossary there that has a lot of this really adorable language, like all the different ways you can go aww and spell it.

So all these different spelling, like HN, for example.

There’s another vector that other people have discovered, and I think they’re right, as a source of really, really popularizing this language.

And that vector is the Dogspotting Facebook group.

And so there’s something like 800,000 members to this group.

And basically what they do is post pictures of animals that they’ve come across or had an interaction with or their own pets.

And a lot of the languages are just adorable.

And then the other vector is the We Rate Dogs Twitter feed.

Oh, yeah.

Where every dog is rated on a scale of 1 to 10.

And they’re always like 13 out of 10.

Wood pets and 12 out of 10 is super adorable.

Emily, you sound like you go to all these websites.

Yeah, yeah.

These are all pretty classic Internet spaces.

It’s funny, because it feels like everyone kind of came to these same conclusions, like, independently.

Like, the amount of people I know who call their pets bean, which I think probably did come from the little toe beans, it’s all part of the same, you know, colloquial phrase for a cute little thing as a bean.

And, you know, the blooping and the blooming and the blupping.

Like, I saw it from so many different corners of the Internet, kind of, like, independently gaining traction and all these different types of people.

They just seem right.

Yeah, it’s sort of like the internet is the dog park for people with cats, right?

Well, it’s not just cats.

It’s dogs and birds.

Burbs.

Not birds.

Burbs.

But burbs, yeah.

Dogs and burbs and squirbs.

That’s squirrels in my house.

And any Q&A will really.

The linguist Gretchen McCulloch, she runs a cool podcast called Lingthusiasm, where they talk about linguistic things from an even wonkier linguistic perspective than this show.

And she has done a couple of interviews here and there, including with NPR in 2017, where she’s talked about all this kind of language.

She’s kind of focusing on doggo and pupper and pupperino and things like that.

So look for this 2017 NPR article.

Just look for the word doggo on the NPR website and you’ll find it.

And there’s a ton more information about this kind of language.

Oh, that’s so exciting.

Emily, it’s great to talk with you.

All right.

Well, I hope you guys have a great rest of your day.

You too.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Boop.

Boop.

Boop.

See you.

Boop.

Bye-bye.

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