"Splooting" explained

It's not complicated, and we've all seen it.  Mammals cool off by exposing their ventral surfaces (where there is less hair) to a cool surface.  TIL that there is a word for this.

The earliest use of the term he could find was around 2011... The word “didn’t have much use in printed, edited prose, however, and maintained a pretty low profile... “It seems like newspapers and magazines discovered the sploot in about 2020.”

It might be a variation on “splat”, Stamper wrote, “and that would actually fit its pre-corgi history nicely.” Sploot “has been used in cartoons as one of those onomatopoeic sound descriptions since at least the 1950s; it seemed to be a favorite of the folks behind the Bugs Bunny comic”. It also calls to mind the word “splay”, as a caller to Barrett’s show noted.

Photo via The Guardian, which also has pix of a squirrel, polar bear, and marmot splooting.