water snake

plural water snakes · alternative watersnake

1. A snake that resides in, or spends a lot of time in, fresh water.
2. A toy consisting of a liquid and (optionally) plastic trinkets encased in a long, soft, plastic torus. It is difficult to grip.

   It slips out of your hands easily, like a water-snake toy.

   2020 November 12, Reni Eddo-Lodge, Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN, page 64

   5 more examples

   Trying to pin him down on any one topic, much less a specific time and place, is like trying to hold onto a Water Snake toy—as soon as I think I have a firm grip, he comes gooshing out the other side.

   2010 November 1, Mike McMullen, I, Superhero!! :: We Wear Tights So You Won't Have To, Kensington Publishing Corp., →ISBN

   Each time I tried to define it and pin it down to take a closer look, it seemed to slip away from me like one of those water snake toys that you can never hold on to. And then one day I finally discovered the problem.

   2015 September 15, M. R. O'Connor, Resurrection Science: Conservation, De-Extinction and the Precarious Future of Wild Things, St. Martin's Press, →ISBN, page 221

   Or to put it differently, tactility reveals the body as a single self-enclosed surface, like a Klein bottle or one of those “water snake” toys, a kid's novelty, in its own way a polymorphous sleeve or screen over which libidinous and[…]

   2017 November 28, Keith Leslie Johnson, Jan Svankmajer, University of Illinois Press, →ISBN

   In this Order, "toy water snake” means a toy that is a flexible tube which contains water and which is made of any rubber or plastics.

   1968, Great Britain, Statutory Instruments

   She imagined a long pink tube with a winking hole at the end sliding from a body, like a grisly penis or one of those water-snake balloon toys kids give hand jobs to.

   2016 August 22, Michelle Tea, Black Wave, The Feminist Press at CUNY, →ISBN, page 155

   Synonyms: water wiggler, water wigglie, water wienie