Longtime readers know I get really cranky around this time of year, and not just about politics and all the grandstanding and other ridiculousness that comes with it. It came to a head last week with the official start of summer and the realization I couldn’t live in my house any longer (I’ve known for a while, but the last straw was last week).

I was not made for summer. I was made for mild temperatures and cool breezes, for cold water and lemonade during the day, and drinking chocolate at night. Give me the delights of summer—homemade ice cream, fireflies lighting the sky at dusk, loads of wildflowers, snow cones—but don’t make me sit in a run-down house with no functioning air conditioning. I had enough of that as a kid, and I’m too old, fat and cranky to deal with it now, especially with one neighbor blasting the absolute worst gospel music ever made any time I have a headache.

I’m not the only one who’s not a fan of summer, but at least what animals do to deal with the oppressive heat is adorable, as bestie Sarah reminded me Monday morning as I was dealing with working on the Voices and editorial pages while simultaneously attempting to make a deal on a house. With the comment, “Sploot season is here!” on the National Park Service’s Facebook post, Sarah reminded me of all that is cute about summer.

OK, really, it’s just the splooting, but sometimes that’s enough.

I’ve talked about splooting before, but for the uninitiated, here are the basics involved, according to the Park Service (it’s a great account to follow): “‘Splooting’ is when an animal sprawls out, usually face down with all arms and legs sticking out. Why the sploot? It could be that an animal wants an all-body stretch, it’s simply a comfortable and relaxing position, or stretching out on a cooler surface may help lower their body temperature. Be the sploot. Geez, how many times have you said the word ‘sploot’?”

Not enough, in my books. Words that are fun to say, like persnickety, kerfuffle and sploot, should be said often if they lift your spirits, especially on hot summer days.

Of course I have to get all word-nerdy with it. Sploot is of recent enough coinage that it’s not yet in most dictionaries (though Oxford English Dictionaries is said to be tracking it, and I imagine Merriam-Webster is as well). In a 2022 story after the New York City Parks agency posted a “don’t worry about squirrels splooting; they’re fine” tweet, Matthew Cantor of the Guardian spoke to lexicographer and “A Way With Words” radio show host Grant Barrett, who told him the word seems to have originated with “doggo” language, a canine-inspired Internet-speak (featuring words such as “bork” and “pupperino”).

Barrett noted that pinpointing its exact origin could drive one up the wall. “It would take you days or even a week to slog through all of the posts and comments in these [doggo-focused] groups to figure out who first said it.” Barrett suspects, though, that Australians might have had a hand in creating the word since they have the tendency to create such cutesy terms. (Other sources cite it as British slang, pointing to the use of the word and how corgis, the late Queen Elizabeth II’s boon companions, tend to sprawl.) The earliest use he found was around 2011, just as fellow lexicographer Kory Stamper had found.

The word “didn’t have much use in printed, edited prose, however, and maintained a pretty low profile—it stayed splooted, if you will—until very recently,” Stamper wrote in an email to the Guardian. “It seems like newspapers and magazines discovered the sploot in about 2020.”

Stamper said the word might be a variation of “splat.” Others think it’s a play on “splay.” At this point, who knows? I just know it makes me happy when I see an animal doing it.

Barrett said of the language used for animals of late, “I think that this whole batch of language really also comes from not just your natural tendency to talk to animals in a cute way, like you would a baby, but in your natural tendency to welcome them as a thinking being.”

Oooh, wait … is this venturing into “fur-baby” territory? Should a certain person double up on his medication before reading this? Someone hand me a fur-nephew or niece, please.

Humans don’t look as cute when they attempt to sploot as when, say, a squirrel or a bear does it. (Well, they’re closer to the ground than we are, with proportionally shorter limbs, so it’s also easier for them to get up without making a big production of it.) Then again, if we’re lucky, we have access to other means to cool off, like air conditioning and cold showers, that those animals don’t.

As temperatures rise around the planet, don’t be surprised if you see even more of the behavior, though at some point it may not be as effective. Sarah Kuta of Smithsonian Magazine reported in July 2023, “[I]f global temperatures continue to rise because of human-caused climate change, there may come a day when splooting simply won’t be enough to cool creatures down.

“‘For every kind of thermal regulatory mechanism, there is a point at which it doesn’t work anymore, and that depends on environmental temperature,’ says Andrea Rummel, a bioscientist at Rice University, to NPR’s Kai McNamee. ‘Just like with humans, sweating works really well a lot of the time. But if it’s too humid outside and the water won’t evaporate, you can sweat all you want but it won’t evaporate off you and draw that heat away.’”

C’mon, air conditioning (and inspection report on the house I’m considering). Don’t let me down …