GWD: Snickerdoodle

The snickerdoodle embodies an aspect of gnomish wordsmithing coupled with cuisine. Is it an insidious effort on the part of gnomes to win people over through cookies? One can only wonder, but the word embodies gnomish syntax, first used in 1889, perhaps of German origin (although, like all things gnomish, this is uncertain, as you can see below). 

snick·er·doo·dle
n. of  uncertain origin

cookie made with butter, sugar, and flour that is rolled in cinnamon sugar before baking

The gnomish word-perversity is apparent in taking what's effectively a sugar cookie and giving it a name like "snickerdoodle" to convey a perhaps unearned degree of whimsy (again, always integral to the gnomish agenda).

Interestingly, Wikipedia offers some clues about the etymology of the word -- do note the bit about the "simple or foolish fellow" and "simply a nonsense word with no particular meaning" -- that's a smoking gnome gun, if you ask me.

48: One-Man Bands

Hah! You thought the gnomes had gotten to me, didn't you, Gentle Reader? I know it's been quite awhile. I mean, I haven't posted since 2015! No doubt the Gnomish Agenda has advanced in the past eight years. Well, I'm still here, and I'm still loathing gnomes.

To that end, a definite gnomish thing is the concept of the one-man band. I'm not talking Nine Inch Nails, here (not gnomish, despite being a one-man band), but, rather, those hapless souls you might see performing at festivals and street fairs, trying to do what, exactly? Make beautiful music? Impress tourists with their industriously brazen moxie? I don't know.

I have a pet theory around the existence of one-man bands: these are human males (overwhelmingly human males) who have been apparently cursed by the Gnomish underground to make fools of themselves in this fashion. 

Is it a life sentence? Do one-man bands do this for their entire lives? Or until they hurl themselves off bridges? I'm not sure, but there are few contraptions (?) more resolutely gnomish than the one-man band.

The next time you're at a street festival or fair, or in any kind of public setting and you see a one-man band performing, know that this poor soul has been cursed by gnomes.

Or, perhaps worse, they're gnomish-adjacent madmen who aspire toward gnomedom.

23: El Camino

Yes, dear reader, the El Camino represents a high (or is it low?) point in gnomish automotive engineering. The more sensitive of you might protest: "How can a semi-infamous, semi-legendary muscle car, of all things, be gnomish? Do gnomes even drive muscle cars?" And my answer is simply this: if they did drive cars, gnomes would drive El Caminos.

The El Camino, by its very nature, embodies gnomish nonsensical design aesthetics -- is it a truck? Is it a car? Is it both? Is it neither? Is it all of these things, and, yet, is also less than those things, too? Why, yes.

It is an El Camino. The neither here-nor-there aspect of the El Camino is the "tell" that reveals the gnomish design sensibilities embedded in it. The El Camino is the gnome masquerading as a badass, which shows why the car design was such an odd and contradictory fit.

While not the only gnomish vehicle out there (again, the unicycle comes directly to mind), few cars have ever skated close to the aesthetic abyss that is gnomish design sensibilities like the El Camino. There are other gnomish automobiles out there, but I had to start with the Elvis Presley of gnomish wheels. "El Camino" literally means "The Path" or "The Way." And it surely guarantees that on the road to gnomish living, you will get there fastest driving one of these babies.