When do you 'fart' or when do you 'pass wind'?

My daughter sent me the funniest story yesterday. It is from a blog called

http://hahasforhoohas.com/the-fart-that-almost-altered-my-destiny/.

It is the story of a first date, when she met the man of her dreams, and completely fumegated him as she 'passed wind'. It brought back many memories, because when we were children the word 'fart' was considered slightly obscene, and pretty much a swear word and never used. So in our family it was always called a 'pop off''. I thnk maybe every family has their own words for some of the bodily functions that we have to deal with on a daily basis.

One of the tips we use as writers, is what is called the 'memory trigger', and in my case this story triggered off quite a few memories of such bodily functions.

When Peter and I were teaching in China, the Chinese students never knew what to call some of these things. They never knew the word poo. In fact, they didn't really know what to say. Of course, in Chinese they would have their own word, but English got them a bit stumped in this regard. And when you think about it, it's not quite right to say you want to go and do faeces. So we taught them wee and poo, but when it came to 'passing wind', they had been taught fart, and that is what was used all the time.

I digress.  Toilets in China are not the normal western toilet, although these days, all new houses and apartments have western loos. But the normal low Chinese loo is still everywhere, and a trial to use when you have creaky knees and hips.

 

Toilet paper is never supplied, there are usually bins provided where everyone puts their used paper. There are usually no handles either, so getting up and down can be a bit tricky, especially as I have old knees that don't like full squatting and complain bitterly when I do get down to it.

One day in one of my classes, I gave them a progressive story to write as a warm up. This is what happened. I've copied and pasted it, so the font is a bit bigger.

On the board I wrote the first sentence of a story. The students sat in pairs across the room and about six rows deep. The first pair in each row wrote my sentence on a piece of paper. In turn they handed this paper to the pair behind them who added another sentence. I collected the finished stories from the pair sitting at the back of the row.

The beginning of this story that I wrote on the board was, ‘There was a loud bang in the airplane’. I thought this would give them scope to take a story in several directions, which it did.

Most of the groups wrote predictable stories where there was going to be a crash, but someone saved them at the last minute. I didn’t read each story through first, which turned out to be a mistake. I read three of the stories to the class, and started on the fourth one.

I read the first line, which was written on the board, and then I started reading the students’ sentences. I just cracked up. I was standing there, crying with laughter, unable to continue. By this time the whole class was giggling. Of course they didn’t know what was on the paper, but I must have been quite a sight, bent over my desk, completely helpless with laughter.

Eventually I asked one of the girls to finish reading it for me. (I hope this doesn’t turn out to be one of those situations where you have to be there for it to be funny). I think it was the unexpectedness of it that took me by surprise and once I started laughing, well that was that. Here is the story, it’s only very short. I hope you get a laugh. I will number the different parts written by each pair.

1.            There was a loud bang in the airplane. All the passengers were frightened. They all shouted, except an old man.

2.            He stood up and said, ‘Calm down, please. It was just a fart.’

3.            Someone shouted, ‘Don’t try to fool us at this critical situation!’ Another roared angrily, ‘How can a fart be so loud?’ The old man said, ‘Because there is a speaker under my buttocks!’

4.            But nobody believed him, there were still a lot of people rushing to the exit.

5.            The old man said ‘Please, please calm down, it’s really a fart.’

6.            The passengers shouted to the old man, ‘Why don’t you control it?’

I dare you to stand in front of 40 students, read that and keep a straight face.

You will also note the use of the word 'buttocks'. Perfectly good word, straight from the dictionary, but not the word we would normally use in our normal speaking.

One last memory that has been triggered was an old friend, my Aunty Estelle's mother Elsie. We had known her for years, but as she got into her eighties, she became the little shrivled up lady that age usually brings on. She took medication, along with lots of vitamins and mineral pills every day. Uncle John used to say that all of Bundaberg (where they lived) would line up to watch her take her daily 33 pills.

She was the most patient woman and never complained. When you asked her how she was, she always said, 'Doing fine dear, doing fine,' even if she was lying in bed with a broken back.

Towards the end of her life, she got quite windy, not that she ate much really, but we always knew when she was up in the morning because we could hear her making her way to the toilet, with a long loud string of pop, pop, pop, all the way to the loo. It's one of the memories I have of her that always makes me smile.  When she died, I put a single rose in her coffin, with a little card, and on it I wrote, 'doing fine dear, doing fine'. She was a lovely old lady.