Most people are comfortable eating in front of others, but few feel at ease when it comes to publicly acknowledging the other end of the alimentary canal. Farting, for example, especially during a meal, has long been considered outre. The ancient historian Suetonius records a story of a man who nearly died of distension after his extreme modesty prevented him from relieving his flatulence while at his host’s table. (Why he did not simply leave the table, I do not know.) When the Roman Emperor Claudius heard of this bloated man’s misfortune, he sympathetically declared his intention to publish an edict making it lawful for a guest to break wind during dinner, though no such edict actually ever came to pass (so to speak). The same punctilious attitude is apparent many centuries later in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales where the Parish Clerk is said to be squeamish about flatulence: “Bot soth to say he was somdel squaymous / Of fartyng.” A few mavericks have written otherwise about passing gas. In the sixteenth century, dramatist John Hey wood penned this rhapsodic couplet: “What winde can there blow, that doth not some men please? A fart in the blowyng doth the blower ease.” The most familiar name of the phenomenon in question, fart, can be traced back thousands of years to the Indo-European perd meaning “to fart.” That Indo-European source also developed into the Greek word perdon, which can be found in the word lycoperdon, an edible fungus whose name literally means wolf’s fart. When dried, this fungus—a .kind of puff-ball—emits a small cloud of spores if it is squeezed. The Indo-European perd also evolved into the Greek perdix, meaning partridge. The bird’s name arose from the fact that when a partridge is flushed from a field, its wings make a distinct whirring sound, reminiscent of a fart. Also related to these words is petard as in the phrase heft by his own petard. The French created the name of this explosive munition from the verb peter, meaning to fart. Over the centuries, fart has not been without linguistic rivals. Since the early fifteenth century, for example, trump has served as a synonym for fart, or rather to denote an especially noisy fart. On the other hand, in the sixteenth century, the word fizzle arose to signify an inaudible fart. That, in fact, was the sole meaning of fizzle until the nineteenth century, when it acquired its current meaning of to sputter out. The early seventeenth century saw the emergence of yet another flatulent synonym, crepitate, a word derived from the Latin crepare, meaning to crack. Around the same time, squib also emerged to denote a fart of minute proportions.