The Great Kittensoft Googly Eyes Mystery!

[Glebe]

I mean look at that.

I purchased this item yesterday, and once I had recovered from my astonishment, I had a question.

Did some prankster do this? Or are they special promotional packs with googly eyed kittens on? It was the last such packet in the shop.

I'm veering towards 'prankster' but I wouldn't put it past the sick minds at Kittensoft to do such a thing.

What do you think?

We must solve the mystery!

[bgmnts]

Do they come off?

[shiftwork2]

There's a subreddit where people put googly eyes on things and upload pictures of it.  I can't see this on there but still looks like Glebe got pranked.

P R A N K E D - G L E B E

[Stoneage Dinosaurs]

Yeah prankster I reckon. Unless it's a pet/beer related conspiracy

[Zero Gravitas]

https://www.reddit.com/r/eyebombing/

[touchingcloth]

There's a subreddit where people put googly eyes on things and upload pictures of it.  I can't see this on there but still looks like Glebe got pranked.

P R A N K E D - G L E B E

Nah, the Kittensoft one is a real promotional packet - www.kittensoft.co.uk/quilted-googlies

[thenoise]

Kids today. In my day it was jolly old broken glass in the pot noodles. A more innocent time.

[touchingcloth]

I used to sprinkle talcum powder in Pixie Stix. Simple, safe, fun for all ages.

[Glebe]

I knew it. I fucking knew it.

@bgmnts Yes, I pulled one off and stuck it back on.

[touchingcloth]

I've pranked Reddit right back by going down Hobbycraft and stapling kittens to the packets of googly eyes.

[Shaxberd]

That's just how those sorts of cat look. Inbreeding is a terrible thing.

[Glebe]

I've pranked Reddit right back by going down Hobbycraft and stapling kittens to the packets of googly eyes.

[Butchers Blind]

I woke up to find googly eyes on my ballsack.

[shiftwork2]

Whenever I think of used shit roll I think of 'Quilted dreams'.

At some point copywriters are going to be made to explain themselves.

[touchingcloth]

I woke up to find googly eyes on my ballsack.

Duh ner ner duh duh

[The Dog]

Can anything else be googly or is it just eyes?

[Butchers Blind]

Can anything else be googly or is it just eyes?

Cricket balls.

[There Be Rumblings]

Search engines

[PlanktonSideburns]

Googly nob

[Blue Jam]

During lockdown someone at my werkplace was putting googly eyes on bits of equipment, warning signs, door buttons etc. This was long before Everything Everywhere All At Once came out so they were impressively ahead of the curve.

[Gurke and Hare]

Whenever I think of used shit roll I think of 'Quilted dreams'.

I don't think Glebe's been buying used bog roll has he? At least I hope he hasn't.

[Glebe]

I've got to bed with all shitty hands again.

[The Dog]

I expect its very difficult to wipe your bum properly with googly hands.

[Glebe]

Utterly doolally!

[Brian Freeze]

My avatar is a poster spotted in Wales with googly eyes added. I think they picked the Roid Rage Range to apply instead of fluffy kitten.

[Theoretical Dentist]

Can anything else be googly or is it just eyes?

Eyes are overwhelmingly the most common thing described as googly. In the Corpus of Global Web-Based English here are the number of occurrences of 'googly' followed by a noun:

Full results

googly eyes	97
googly eye	7
googly goodness	3
googly gooeys	3
googly features	2
googly stuff	2
googly success	1
googly thing	1
googly glasses	1
googly baby	1
googly bowler	1
googly bowlers	1
googly bowling	1
googly bowls	1
googly brilliance	1
googly exponent	1
googly graphics	1
googly master	1
googly moments	1
googly people	1
googly pupils	1
googly search	1
googly series	1
googly sight	1

[close]

So 97 occurrences of 'googly eyes', seven of 'googly eye', three each of 'googly goodness' and 'googly gooeys', two each of 'googly features' and 'googly stuff', and various other phrases that only occur once in the 1.9 billion words of the corpus.

In the 'English (2019)' corpus in the Google Books Ngram Viewer, searching for 'googly' as an adjective followed by any noun shows these phrases in the results: 'googly eyes', 'googly eye', 'googly noises', 'googly bowling', 'googly bowlers', 'googly bowler', and 'googly ball'. 'Eyes' and 'eye' are vastly more common than any of the others.

The phrases with balls, bowlers, etc, are presumably referring to the googly, a type of delivery in cricket, and in these cases the word 'googly' is occurring as a noun adjunct rather than a true adjective (despite Google Books' tagging), so I would say these aren't really cases of balls (etc) being described as googly.

So the only things other than eyes that these searches show being described as googly with any frequency are goodness, gooeys (probably referring to this website), features, stuff and noises. But all these are much, much less common than eyes.