What's in a kiss? Charlotte Coleman-Smith looks into the history of snogging

From our earliest days, we're told that kisses have magical powers. They can turn frogs into princes, virgins into pliant lovers and - according to Celtic legend - represent the very breath of life. A kiss is never just a kiss: it's a symbol of love, lust, friendship, duty and betrayal; a ritual laden with significance, which can conceal wildly different motives. Politicians kiss babies, Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, and the Pope's first act on reaching Ireland in 1979 was to kiss the ground at Dublin airport. A bad kiss can sound the death knell for a relationship, while a good kiss - well, it can put shiny happy bells on everything.

The first kiss
Listen to the academics, and you may well wonder why we bother. Some claim that the act of kissing began with prehistoric mothers chewing up food, then pushing it into their children's mouths with their tongues. Others believe kissing evolved from the smelling of a companion's face as an act of greeting. Whatever the truth, for millions of years, lips and mouths have played a crucial part in our survival. The brain contains a huge amount of receptors devoted to picking up sensations from the lips. They direct a baby towards milk, and they helped our ancestors to discern whether their food was poisonous or not. Freud, typically, goes back in time to our childhood, describing the kiss as 'an unconscious repetition of infantile delight in feeding', and - just to kill off any trace of romance - as the 'sexual use of the mucous membranes of the lips and mouth'.

An apple a day
The kiss has been at the centre of any number of coy courtship rituals. In 16th-century England, young girls would present a clove-studded apple to someone they wanted to kiss. The chap in question would chew on one of the cloves - they are supposed to freshen the breath - before puckering up. After that, the man took possession of the apple and the game continued. But while the Elizabethans were passing the apple, the government of Naples was banning the practice of kissing entirely, making it punishable by death. Such killjoys still exist. In the US state of Indiana, there is a law on the books making it illegal for a man with a moustache to 'habitually kiss human beings'.

Snogging, not jogging
The average person spends two weeks of their life performing Philematology - that's kissing to you and I. This can sound like a long time if you're puckering up with a bad kisser, but take heart - kissing has a number of useful health benefits. Fans of oral hygiene will be delighted to learn that extra saliva may wash bacteria off your teeth, which can help break down plaque. Better still, kissing might help you lose weight. The average kisser burns two calories a minute while smooching. There have even been studies suggesting that people who kiss their spouses goodbye before leaving for work earn higher incomes on average than those heartless people who don't.

Kissing by the book
Some of our finest poets and playwrights have transformed this simple act into a quasi-spiritual experience; a meeting of souls: 'And our spirits rushed together at the touching of the lips,' wrote Lord Alfred Tennyson. In Prometheus Unbound, Percy Bysshe Shelly describes
'the soft and sweet eclipse,
When soul meets soul on lover's lips'.

Edmond de Rostand's most famous creation, Cyrano de Bergerac, was also a fan of the kiss too:
'a rosy dot
Placed on the 'i' in loving; 'tis a secret
Told to the mouth instead of to the ear.'

But not everyone adored the delights of snogging. 'Lord! I wonder what fool it was that first invented kissing,' grumbled Irish satirist, Jonathan Swift in Polite Conversation.

The first time?
Our first snog, for better or worse, is etched in our memory. Mine was cold, wet and mildly repugnant. It was also witnessed by my grandmother, who happened to be passing through the room in which my fourteenth birthday party was being held. The thought still makes me hot with shame, but thankfully, things improved and in my (relatively) short life, I've run the gamut from soft and sloppy to firm, fleshy and - to use that word beloved of the Royal Mail - urgent.

Of course, we don't always kiss people we are meant to. This is half the fun. If you find yourself in a compromising position, remember the words of Groucho Marx when his wife caught him kissing a showgirl. 'Kissing? I was whispering in her mouth'.