Friday Etymology Lesson: fart

Sigh, my friend John Adams insisted on this one, so you get what you asked for, the etymology of fart.

One of the oldest words in the English vocabulary, fart comes from two Proto-Indo-European words perd, meaning, “break wind loudly,” and pezd “break wind softly.”  Obviously these two words are onomatopoeias.  I’ve mentioned before that d sounds often morph into t sounds in Indo-European.  Well, the same thing happened with p and f sounds, so from perd we got furzen in German, which became fart in English.

Speaking of the English, their custom of rhyming slang gave us raspberry tart as a slang term for fart, which is why it’s called a raspberry when you make a fart sound like Lily Tomlin used to do at the end of her Edith Ann character skits.  Aaaaand now I’m dating myself.