Improve Your Word Power by Caroline Taggart

Author:Caroline Taggart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michael O'Mara

Body language

You’re probably familiar with flatulence or flatus as more elegant terms for another word beginning with f and meaning breaking wind. We can disguise the body’s other embarrassing noises under technical terms, too.

• Eructation – better known as burping, from the Latin for to emit.

• Singultus – from the Latin for a sob or speech broken by sobs (who knew there was a word for that?). Lord Byron used it in this sense; a doctor would mean hiccups.

And best of all:

• Borborygmus, rumbling in the tummy. An Ancient Greek word, suggesting that even the Mediterranean diet didn’t leave you immune. If you’re wondering how to work this into a conversation, the Oxford English Dictionary cites this useful quotation from H. G. Wells, writing in the Sunday Express newspaper in 1927: Elephant hunters say that they can tell the proximity of a herd by the borborygmic noises the poor brutes emit.

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