The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Concealed Farts

Aubrey’s Brief Lives contains this sad story about the seventeenth Earl of Oxford:

Farts are quickly delivered and slowly forgotten. The English language, though, has had much more than seven years to let the world forget its flatulence. The smell of the original meaning slowly peters out.

Take, for example, the phrase peter out. Nobody is quite sure where it comes from, but one of the best theories is that it comes from the French peter, which meant fart. Peter definitely gave us the word petard, meaning a little explosive, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who has eaten beans.

However, when Hamlet says, ‘’Tis sport to have the engineer hoist with his own petard’, he doesn’t mean that the poor engineer is raised into the air by the jet-power of his own flatulence, but that he’s blown upward by his own explosive. The fart had ceased to smell.

The same thing has happened with the phrase fizzle out, which once meant cutting the cheese and was delicately described in one nineteenth-century dictionary as ‘an escape backwards’. The same dictionary describes a fice as:

And fice itself comes from the Old English fist, which likewise meant fart. In Elizabethan times a smelly dog was called a fisting cur, and by the eighteenth century any little dog was called a feist, and that’s where we get the word feisty from. Little dogs are so prone to bark at anything that an uppity girl was called feisty, straight from the flatulent dogs of yore. This is a point well worth remembering when you’re next reading a film review about a ‘feisty heroine’.

The fart lingers.

Our word partridge comes from the Old French pertis which comes from the Latin perdix which comes from the Greek perdix­ which comes from the Greek verb perdesthai which means fart, because that’s what a partridge sounds like when it flies. The low, loud beating of the wings sounds like the clapping of the buttocks when the inner gale is liberated.

A polite, even beautiful, word for foods that make your bottom quack is carminative. There used to be carminative medicines, for it was widely believed that farting was good for you, as in the rhyme:

This belief in the curative powers of flatulence was, originally, based on the idea of humours. The body was thought to be filled with substances that could get horribly out of balance. A fart was a like a comb or card being pulled through wool and removing the knots. The Latin for a wool card was carmen, which has nothing to do with the opera, but is exactly the same as heckling.