| It sounds like it should be dirty... |
[Jun. 18th, 2007|12:34 am]
Say It To Me
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.. but eructation: \ih-ruhk-TAY-shuhn\ is merely the act of belching or a belch.
This was a dictionary.com word of the day.
Sometimes I wonder at the existence of words like this. It comes, as many of our words do, from the Latin. Was it adopted because the anglo-saxon version was considered vulgar? There was a time when the word "stink" also wasn't considered fit for polite society.
How do words become good or bad? Do we come up with these euphemisms to distance ourselves from the all-too-earthly reality of our human bodies, or did this one originate just because people liked to drop Latin into their conversation to show they were educated? |
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