Fart
As a term of vulgarity or personal abuse, fart has never been especially taboo, being quite commonly used in medieval times and up to the eighteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary entry (published in 1895) carried the usage note: “Not now in decent use,” which is still generally the case, while a century later Random House (1994) concurred: “usually considered vulgar.” Reading the citations from Sir James Murray’s august work, one clearly detects a sense of spontaneous animal energy running through them.
There is a historical anomaly in that fart is regarded as Anglo-Saxon and has many Germanic cognates, but the form feortan is hypothetical, there being no instance prior to Middle English. The first quotation in the OED is from the charming thirteenth-century lyric “Sumer is icumen in” (“Summer has arrived”). The context runs: “bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth,” a line that has caused some academic embarrassment, since the most obvious literal interpretation, namely “the bullock cavorts; the buck farts,” is regarded as too crude. Consequently, some scholars have preferred to interpret verteth as “to cavort” or “to gamble,” even though there is no other contemporary instance of a verb “to vert.” Chaucer’s foul-mouthed Miller mocks the prissy character Absolon in his bawdy tale by observing that “he was somdeel squaymous of fartyng,” that is, “he was rather squeamish about farting” (ll. 3337-38), making fun of this anal retentive behavior. Cruelly, Absolon turns out to be a man more farted against than farting.
Queen Elizabeth, according to an anecdote retailed by John Aubrey, naughtily reminded Edward de Vere of an embarrassing public episode by remarking: “My lord, I had forgot the Fart” ( Brief Lives ). The seventeenth-century clergyman poet Robert Herrick wrote of “the farting tanner” ( Hesperides , I, 216), while his contemporary Charles Cotton noted in his Poetical Works : “He was the loudest of farters” (ca. 1687, 9). Dr. Johnson (1755) included fart without special comment, using the old plain definition “to break wind.” Francis Grose lists the moresurreptitious fizzle and fice (“a small windy escape backwards, more obvious to the nose than ears”) as well as two racy metaphors, fart-catcher for a valet or footman and fartleberries for “excrement hanging about the anus” in his slang dictionary (1785). Thereafter the word started to be regarded as indecent, but not heinously so.
Personal insult is more difficult to trace historically, although previously farting was itself a form of symbolic insult. In Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), Subtle dismisses Face provocatively, saying: “I fart at thee!” (I i 2). There was also a common medieval idiom that something of little value was “not worth a fart.” Yet many of the common modern uses, such as “an old fart” and “farting about” are relatively recent. The OED Supplement traces the second to dialect use in the North of England about 1900, while Random House (1994) gives a first instance of “old fart” in 1934.
The term is not as common or idiomatically diversified in American English. Although unlisted in the Australian National Dictionary (1988), fart is fairly common in that variety, while in South African English it is used with the same frequency and application as in British English. However, the Afrikaans equivalent, namely poep , is commonly used in colloquial phrases like the dismissive loan translation “he’s an old poep.” The same term has come from Dutch through to American English, where it has different senses closely related to excrement.
User Comments Add a comment…