Transript:

Ambrose Bierce must have been a very lonely man. In his Devil’s Dictionary kiss is defined thus:

A word invented by the poets as a rhyme for “bliss.” It is supposed to signify, in a general way, some kind of rite or ceremony appertaining to a good understanding; but the manner of its performance is unknown to this lexicographer.

There aren’t too many synonyms for kiss. A peck on the cheek is one perhaps. So is necking, for a different kind of kiss. Smooching I suppose. I see that in Latin there were two words to describe passionate and friendly kisses. The passionate kiss was saviari (although this seems such a rare thing that it doesn’t even put in a showing in the Oxford English Dictionary even as part of the supporting text and Google only finds 5 instances of it in combination with kiss).

The Latin kiss you might give your sister was osculum. I always had heard that things Latin were so passionate; here I find their kisses are pretty tame, at least as revealed by Google. Maybe that’s why the language died out.

That second flavour, osculum gave rise to an English word osculate but it seems to have entered the language mainly through the earliest forms of dictionaries, and no one picked up on it or ever seemed to have used it much.

Those first dictionaries were very different from our dictionaries of today. Now a dictionary is more or less intended to be a snapshot showing how English is being used in real life—and of course there are lots of challenges to this—but those very first dictionaries were really only lists of words that the authors and editors thought you might not know already. If it was a common word that everyone did know, it wouldn’t make it into the dictionary. At first dictionaries were a kind of self help book for conversationally ambitious social climbers.

I see the poet that Ambrose Bierce might have been thinking of was Samuel Coleridge who was around approximately a century before the Devil’s Dictionary came into being. In his poem The Kiss he writes:

Ah why refuse the blameless bliss?
Can danger lurk within a kiss?

I think it can, and I think Coleridge thought so too by the end of it. This comes from the OED citation for the word kiss and there it is attributed to poems for Sara. His wife was named Sara, but so was the sister of his friend Wordsworth’s wife, and he was pretty keen on her too. Allow me to read a little more from that Kiss poem.

Well pleased I hear the whispered “no!”
The whispered “no”—how little meant!
Sweet falsehood that endears consent!
For on those lovely lips the while
Dawns the soft relenting smile
Attempts with feigned dissuasion coy
The gentle violence of Joy.

Hmmm. What ever happened to “no means no”?

They say he never really loved the Sara his wife. He spent many years addicted to opium and was eventually estranged from his family. I guess it’s hard to deny him a little blameless bliss if he could get it.