Hi, I'm the author of the column that was referred to by Suzanne F. I just joined EGullet, and I'm happy to post the column here, though I'd of course encourage everyone to check out Gastronomica, where it was first published. Sincerely, Mark Morton here.and.now@shaw.ca http://io.uwinnipeg.ca/~morton PS I think the italics and other formatting will be lost as I post the column here. ________________________ Publication: Gastronomica: A Journal of Food and Culture Column: Orts and Scantlings Author: Mark Morton Somdel Squaymous WARNING: this column is about flatulence. If you find such a subject too cheeky, or if you (like my mother) think I’m full of beans, then turn the page now. On the other hand, if you recognize that it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, then read on and discover some curious etymological tidbits. According to the ancient historian Suetonius, the Roman Emperor Claudius once wanted to publish an edict making it lawful for a guest to break wind during dinner. He was motivated, says Suetonius, by the story of a man who nearly died of distension after his extreme modesty prevented him from relieving his flatulence while at his host’s table. Other cultures have not shared this punctilious attitude toward the intestinal gases produced by digestion. For example, in the medieval poem “Sumer Is Icumen In” the speaker takes delight in the signs of approaching spring, such as the cavorting of bulls and the farting of deer: “Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth.” And in Chaucer’s “The Miller’s Tale,” the narrator is bemused by a Parish Clerk’s squeamishness about passing gas: “Bot soth to say he was somdel squaymous / Of fartyng.” A century and a half later, the dramatist John Heywood extolled the virtues of liberating flatulence when he wrote this rhapsodic couplet: "What winde can there blow, that doth not some men please? A fart in the blowyng doth the blower ease." It was also in the late Middle Ages that the word “fumosity” arose to describe a given food’s tendency to provoke flatulence. Garlic and onions were then thought to be high on the fumosity scale, just as beans (that musical fruit) are nowadays. “Fumosity” was formed from the Latin word fumus, meaning “smoke” or “steam.” From the same Latin source English also derived “fumette,” a word denoting the aroma given off by meats that are allowed to hang in the open air until cellular decomposition sets in. Although some gastronomes have prized this gamy aroma, Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century dictionary maker, seemed less enthusiastic: “Fumette, a word introduced by cooks, and the pupils of cooks, for the stink of meat.” Much older than “fumosity” is the word “fart,” which can be traced back thousands of years to the Indo-European perd meaning “to fart.” That Indo-European source also developed into the Greek word perdon, which can be found in the word “lycoperdon,” an edible fungus whose name literally means “wolf’s fart.” When dried, this fungus -- a kind of puff-ball -- emits a small cloud of spores if it is squeezed. The Indo-European perd also evolved into the Greek perdix, meaning “partridge.” The bird name arose from the fact that when a partridge is flushed from a field, its wings make a distinct whirring sound, reminiscent of a fart. Also related to these words is “petard” as in the phrase “heft by his own petard.” The French created the name of this explosive munition from the verb péter, meaning “to fart.” Over the centuries, “fart” has not been without linguistic rivals. Since the early fifteenth century, for example, “trump” has served as a synonym for “fart,” or rather to denote an especially noisy fart. On the other hand, in the sixteenth century, the word “fizzle” arose to signify an inaudible fart. That, in fact, was the sole meaning of “fizzle” until the nineteenth century, when it acquired its current meaning of “to sputter out.” The early seventeenth century saw the emergence of yet another flatulent synonym, “crepitate,” a word derived from the Latin “crepare,” meaning “to crack.” Around the same time, “squib” also emerged to denote a fart of minute proportions. As for the word “flatulence,” its original meaning was metaphorical rather than physiological. It appeared in the early eighteenth century to denote the condition of being “puffed up” with pride or pomposity. It was not until the mid nineteenth century that it was used to denote the condition of being puffed up with digestive gases. The adjective “flatulent,” however, was used much earlier, though only to describe things rather than people. In 1656, for example, Thomas Blount wrote in his Glossographia that “Pease and Beans are flatulent meat,” and in 1671 the meteorologist Ralph Bohun asserted that “Spring and Autumn…are the most Flatulent Seasons of the yeere.” In origin, the word “flatulence” derives from the Latin flare, meaning “to puff.” By combining this word with the prefix sub, the ancient Romans created subflare, or rather sufflare, meaning “to puff from below.” This word eventually became the French soufflé, which English cooks borrowed in the early nineteenth century. (Curiously, the first use of the word in English cookery is in a recipe for a “soufflé of young partridges.”) The Latin flare also gave rise to the Vulgar Latin flator, meaning “smell,” which eventually became the English word “flavour,” first appearing in the fourteenth century. For the next three hundred years, “flavour” referred only to smells, and not just food smells: flowers, incense, skunks, and smoke all had flavours. In the late seventeenth century, however, “flavour” came to mean “taste,” a change that may have been inspired by the resemblance of “flavour” to “savour.” Cheese has a connection to flatulence, and so do raspberries and eggplants. The idiom “cut the cheese” has been current since at least 1969, when I began grade one; oddly, however, that phrase is not recorded in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1989. The flatulent sense of “raspberry,” on the other hand, is included in the Oxford English Dictionary, which traces that sense of the word back to Victorian times, where it denoted a sound imitative of a fart, produced by inserting the tongue between the lips and blowing. This sense of “raspberry” is likely a shortened form of “raspberry tart,” which arose as Cockney rhyming slang for “fart.” As for the eggplant, its British name -- “aubergine” -- derives from a Sanskrit word meaning “the vegetable that prevents farting” or, more literally, “the vegetable that cures the wind-disorder.” This Sanskrit ancestor was vatinganah, which was borrowed by Persian as badingan, which in turn was borrowed by Arabic as al-badinjan, the al simply being the Arabic definite article meaning “the.” This Arabic name then became the Spanish alberengena, which French adopted as aubergine in the early seventeenth century. Finally, in the late eighteenth century, the French name of the plant was adopted by the English, who might have stuck with the name “eggplant” had they known the actual meaning of “aubergine.” I should, at this point, bring this column to a close, lest I be accused of being full of hot air -- a veritable blowhard.
