Cloudy with a chance of quagmires

So much of academic life is simply unbloggable--but not, as I've just discovered, unquaggleable. Let me explain:

Yesterday I was involved in an event that a colleague described as quagmiresque, and while it had its entertaining and even instructive moments, I don't dare write a single word about it publicly. So instead let's think about quagmires--which, according to our friend the Oxford English Dictionary, can serve as either noun or verb, although the verb form appears rarely and only in the passive voice, as in this example from a 1991 Vanity Fair article: "Paglia came under the gnomic spell of Bloom, a whirring mind quagmired in a pudding of flesh."

The OED traces quagmire to the obscure noun quag "a marshy or boggy spot" or the verb quag "to quake" (with its 19th-century variant quaggle, implying "to shake like a jelly"). The OED offers examples of quagmire as far back as 1566 and dates quagmirist  to 1609. There's a word you don't want to see on a resume!

Quagmire can refer to a bog either literal or figurative but Shakespeare may have intended it both ways in Henry VI, Part I when Talbot threatens, "Your hearts I'll stamp out with my horse's heels / and make a Quagmire of your mingled brains." I'm more fond, however, of the elegant simplicity of a sentence written by E. Hellowes in his 1575 translation of the Familiar Epistles of Anthony of Guevara. I've never read Anthony of Guevara's Familiar Epistles and I have no idea who E. Hellowes might have been, but I'd like to tell that Hellowes fellow Hello and congratulate him on his prescient description of the current state of academe: "There be so many quagmires, wherein to bee myred."

Quagmires to the right of me, quagmires to the left--here I am, stuck in the middle with a bunch of quagmirists. No wonder I'm quaking in my boots.