Words: Osculation, n.

"YOU MUST must remember zis, / A kiss is just a kiss, / A fly is just a fly," doodles John Lennon on Anthology. His penchant for pun and wordplay makes one wonder what he could have done with osculation in popular song. From the Latin for kiss, it might sound technical - passion enacted upon a microscope slide - and there are indeed zoological usages.

As for a meeting of the lips, the OED would have us believe that it petered out in the 19th century (Thackeray was fond of it), but it overlooks the most famous 20th-century instance: in Ulysses, when Bloom "kissed the plump mellow yellow melons of her rump, on each plump melonous hemisphere, in their mellow yellow furrow, with obscure prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation".