It's the Word of the Day podcast for November 20th.

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Today's word is snivel, spelled S-N-I-V-E-L. Snivel is a verb. To snivel is to speak or act

in a whining, sniffling, tearful, or weakly emotional manner.

The word snivel may also be used to mean to run at the nose, to snuffle, or to cry or

whine with snuffling.

Here's the word used in a sentence from the Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina.

At first he ran a highway stop with video gambling. To sit and do

nothing for 10 to 12 hours drove me nuts, he said. That's when he found art. I started making

little faces and they were selling so fast I'll put pants and shirts on these guys, he said,

referring to his hand-carved sculptures.

Then people whined and sniffled and wanted bears, so I started carving some bears.

There's never been anything pretty about sniveling. The word snivel, which originally meant

simply to have a runny nose, has an old English ancestor

whose probable form was Sniflan. Its lineage includes some other charming words of yore,

an old English word for mucus, snuffle, the Middle Dutch word for a head cold, snuff,

the old Norse word for snout, which is snuppa,

and Nan, a Greek verb meaning to flow. Nowadays we mostly use snivel as we have since the

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