Writing a newspaper column can be profoundly educational, as I have learned on more than one occasion.

I have learned, for instance, that when something is “antigoglin,” it’s sort of whanky-jawed, meaning it;s skewed in a diagonal direction. I’ve learned that a “mondegreen” is an expression that results from hearing the syllables in a song and misinterpreting them into something entirely different, as in the Scottish ballad that mourns, “They have slain the Earl of Murray and they layd him on the green.” It was often misinterpreted as “They have slain the Earl of Murray and the Lady Mondegreen.” I’ve learned that “agita” is a word in New York Times lingo that means something like “heartburn.” I’ve learned that “crunk” is a word in the hip-hop dialect that means “crazy and drunk.”

I’ve learned these things because readers, assuming me to be some kind of guru of obscure English, have either inquired about them, thus sending me into the depths of Googleland.

But, alas, I learned 55 years too late the romantic meaning of “to piddle.” Had I known it back in the ’50s, when Miss Peggy and I were dating in my 1939 Chevrolet, it might have saved me many a quarter at the ticket booths of drive-in theaters.

“Piddling” was a word frequently used by my daddy to describe whatever I was doing for relaxation when I should have been sweating at some unpleasant task.

As I grew older and began hanging with a more refined bunch, I learned that “piddle,” in addition to meaning wasting time in idle pursuits, was also a euphemism for what Fido does when he cocks his leg at a fence post or a fire hydrant (we didn’t use euphemisms on the farm or the mill village).

Then I received an e-mail from Jeff Cook of Seminole, Okla., who regularly corresponds with me on questions of grammar and usage.

“I was reviewing old letters from my mom,” he wrote. “She said she and my dad would kiss when they saw a one-headlight car. They called them ‘piddles.’ I looked up the definition, and it didn’t say anything about a one-eyed car. Both my mom and dad have passed on, but I remember they would still call those one-eyed cars ‘piddles,’ and kiss each other well into their 70s.”

The question immediately arose in my mind: Did Mom and Dad Cook pull over to the shoulder before engaging in lip-lock, or did Dad plant one on her while still driving down the highway? It seems to me that piddling while driving could be just as dangerous as texting, albeit a lot more fun.

I suppose those Oklahoma roads back then were a lot less busy than I-85 or Fairview Avenue, and Dad could afford to take a chance, at least on the straightaways.

But that left open the question: Why did Jeff’s folks refer to one-eyed cars as “piddles,” and why did they use them as a pretext for playing smacky-mouth?

My dictionaries were no more enlightening than Jeff’s, so I decided to plunge into Googleland. To my surprise, I found that lots of people were familiar with this pleasant form of “piddling,” and that it arose from a game popular with young people back when the baby boomers were young.

It worked this way:

Two young people, presumably of the opposite sex and with a liking for each other, are cruising down the highway at night when they spot a car with only one headlight.

“Padiddle,” says the first one to spot it. He (or she) is then entitled to a kiss from the other person. The word “padiddle” was shortened to “piddle” to describe a car with a missing headlight.

 The origin of “padiddle” is still a mystery to me, but I did find it in Wikipedia, the on-line do-it-yourself encyclopedia. According to Wikipedia, the game can become naughtier, depending on how many inhibitions, among other things, the players are willing to shed. It describes it as “a nighttime travel game with the objective of earning points by spotting vehicles with a burnt-out headlight. You must say ‘padiddle’ and hit the ceiling of the car as fast as you can, while driving. Whoever calls it first gets a point. The person with the highest score is the winner.”

That’s the innocent, sanitized version. The more romantic, but still innocent, version calls for the loser to kiss the winner. A double-date version calls for the first boy who calls “padiddle” to get a kiss from each of the girls.

The game can get progressively bawdy. One variation allows the winner to go to various lengths beyond a kiss if the one-eyed vehicle is a truck or a bus. Another version requires the last person to hit the ceiling to take off an article of clothing. When one person has removed the last stitch, the game is declared over, and it’s time to start a new game. (You’d need a lot of piddles to reach this stage, but down South it’s not unthinkable).

My drive-in dates with Miss Peggy preceded the boomers’ teen years, but I’m pretty sure that had I tried to go beyond the “you-owe-me-a-kiss” stage, she would have done an “Earl of Murray” number on me, and I would have ended up reeling like a crunk with a bad case of agita and the world looking all antigoglin.

Now that we’re both in our 70s, I seized the opportunity to holler “padiddle” when I spotted a one-eyed car as we were driving home one meeting night.

“That means you owe me a kiss,” I told her.

“Wait till we get home,” she said, “and you can kiss me goodnight.”Write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or email him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.