Important Tip!

If you want to sound dignified, don't call it "toilet paper." 

Call it a "loo roll" instead. 

Note: If you're British, Australian, or a Kiwi, ignore this advice. (You already do it!)

New Year, New Vocabulary!

'Defecate' comes from the Latin 'defaecare,' which originally meant to clear of any dregs, or to purify.
— The OED (@OED) December 31, 2014

Doppelgänger Guffles!

Via.

Do you know what a “doppelgänger” is? This German word describes your double—a person who looks just like you. (The word translates to “double-goer.”)

Oh, and you also need to know that a British slang term for fart is "guffle." So anyway, over at the British site [b3ta], I just read a funny story by "mictoboy":

You know that thing where you can stand the smell of your own guffs, but not other people's? So you can drop the most rancid fart in the world and sit there quite happily while everyone else is retching 

Once at work, I popped into the bathroom and was greeted by the smell of previous occupant's sit-down visit. What utterly freaked me out was that although the farty smell was clearly not my own, I could quite happily stand to smell it. It smelled like I'd done it. I'd unwittingly stumbled on my very own “guffleganger”! I am to this day a little disturbed by the incident.

THE THREE MOST DISGUSTING WORDS IN THE WORLD

Congealed 
Vegetable
Salads.

Ick!

Please don't use the word "butt-crack" anymore.

We prefer the more dignified term "intergluteal cleft."

Hey, "scat" is the excrement of a carnivorous mammal

So are you saying what I THINK you're saying? (Via.)

Have you ever known a "urinator"?

Before you answer, a urinator is a person who dives underwater to get sunken treasure.

Why, what did you think I meant?

Have you ever suffered from "Rectal Tenesmus"?

The answer is almost certainly yes. (Rectal tenesmus means "incomplete pooping.")

Vocab.: Why "Piss-Call Charlie" was such a jerk!

piss call (noun) 

1. In boarding schools and camps for young boys, a call made in the middle of the night to go to the urinals. This helped prevent bed-wetting.


2. In the armed services, the same type of call jokingly made for any alarm in the middle of the night, as these were usually scary and might cause bed-wetting.

Hence, Piss-Call Charlie, a World War II term for enemy planes that made night passes. They usually just dropped a bomb or two, but that was enough to wake everyone up and frighten them.

Time to change your pants!

A teacher friend shared how she was correcting a student essay and ran across this:

He was a self-defecating character . . .

Er, you mean self-deprecating?

“Put your arm down. Your hircismus is killing me!”

By Jekert Gwapo

“Hircismus” means “armpit odor.” According to the OED, it comes from the Greek word “hircus” or goat. So do stinky armpits smell like goats? I’ve smelled both, and I’ve never noticed it, but maybe Greek goats are different.

There is a special word for stinky goats: hircine. Ooh, and there’s also a word for people with super-sweaty armpits: maschalephidrosis! 

Today's Vocabulary

cejijunto
: a person with one long continuous eyebrow.

Ooh, and someone cracked me up yesterday by dissing someone's "vile intestinal product." He meant poop!

Disgust was born in France!

From here.

Over at the BBC News Magazine, Megan Lane has an interesting article about the word “disgust.” It’s a relatively new word, one that William Shakespeare never used.

“Disgust” came into the English language in 1601. Its root is the Old French word "desgouster". But it took “disgust” another 200 years to get popular with disgusted speakers.

A language expert named Gerry Breslin says that when disgust is said properly, it gives off a fine sound of outrage:

“The s sounds and the harsh g and final t help to make it a very sonorous and impactful word.”

Example: “The Big Book of Gross Stuff curses the reader with a strong sense of diSS-GusT!”

Vocabulary! (Just admit it: You’re totally bdolotic.)

By Mike Brown

As everyone knows, bdolotic means “to pass a lot of gas.” This is what happens when you eat carminative foods (the ones that make you fart). 

Hey, did you know that the word “fart” comes from the Middle English word farten or ferten ... and THAT comes from the Old English word feortan?

Anyway, if you’re lucky, your flatulence will come out as SBDs that you can blame on someone else. Silent But Deadly farts are also known as feists. This apparently comes from the old Middle English fisten, which unsurprisingly means to break wind. (And if you DO break wind, please be sure to pick up the pieces.)

I can be a real coccydynia!

Heheh. Did you know that coccydynia means “pain in the butt” or “buttache”? (This site is so educational!)

I visited a friend named S. in the hospital yesterday who was going to get his bone marrow sampled. To do this, the doctors bore into the hip bone in S.’s butt. (It’s not as bad as it sounds.) Since the doctors had trouble boring through that bone, S. said:

“I guess that proves that I’m a hard-ass.”

Good one!

BTW, other words for a pain in the butt include rectalgia, proctalgia, and proctodynia. Want to say someone has a hairy butt? Go with dasypygal. Or an ugly butt? That’d be cacopygian. 

Gross Vocabulary: It’s time to “turdify”!

bescumber: (verb) To spray with poop.

Like me, you have bescumbered the toilet from time to time. Up till now, I’ve usually used the word “spackled” for this, e.g., “The west wing is closed, because I just spackled the toilet in there.”

But now I can use bescumbered too! According to Neatorama, related words include:

• bemute: to drop poop on someone from great height),
• shard-born: born in poop
• fimicolous: living and growing on poop

If you’re looking for new words for specific kinds of poop, try:

• meconium: the first poop of a newborn child
• lientery: diarrhea that has partially digested food in it
• steatorrhea: poop with so much fat in it, it floats and won’t flush down the toilet

And finally:

• turdify: to turn into a turd

A Short History of, er, Sh**!

"Oh, skita. Look who's here!"

There are bad words and then there are BAD words. So just to warn you, this blog post mentions the bad word in the post's title.

But I’m sort of surprised that sh** IS a bad word. After all, it has a long and distinguished history!

A thousand years ago, if a Viking wanted to say poop, he used the Old Norse word for it: skita.

The word skita made its way to England, where it was altered a bit. In the 1300s, an English poem named Kyng Alisaunder referred to amazing snakes in the exotic East that “shiteth preciouse stones.” Nice snakes!

Guy Schmidt

By the 1600s, it was common to describe loudmouths as people who “cracked shit-fire.” 

And in the 1700s, the word got so popular, that a dictionary lists a wide variety of words like shit-abed (pooping the bed), shit-breech (someone who poops his pants) and shittle-come-shites.

I have no idea what that last one means. But I DO know that in 1875, there was an expression of disgust known as “shittletidee”!

Anyway, Brits today often still use “shite,” while Americans typically leave the “-e” off. But either way, if you still think of it as cursing, I have some good news: It turns out that swearing is a powerful pain-killer! (So it's okay to shout "Skita!" if you stub your toe.)

Fun Fact! May 29th is Shit Sack Day. (Do not confuse it with Shitten Saturday.)

Top photo by Duncan Harris. 

Thanks to Paul Collins 

for doing the heavy lifting!

"Cackling Farts" Defined!

In my far-reaching research, I recently learned that there was an old slang term called “cackling-farts.” Were these farts so horrible, they sounded like an old crone laughing? I had to find out!

After consulting the First English Dictionary of Slang, 1699, I found that cackling farts were a slang term for eggs. I guess the idea was that chickens cackle, especially when they’re laying eggs. So the eggs were cackling farts…though cackling poops makes more sense!

Here’s a few other words I learned:

• Bumfodder: Toilet paper, or “what serves to wipe the Tail.”
• Farting crackers: Pants, or “Breeches.”
• Fizzle: “A little or low-sounding Fart.”

Vocabulary Words of the Day!

Photo by Orin Zebest

encopresis: To accidentally go poop, usually in your pants.

imbulbitate: To poop your pants. Example: “From little Timmy’s expression, we knew he had imbulbitated.”

Say It. Don't Spray It!

Your gross word of the day:

sialoquent (adjective): Spraying saliva when speaking.