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Print This Post Why the English Language is awesome Posted 2 months, 23 days ago., on Saturday, June 7th, 2008, at 10:51 am

A word I vaguely remembered last night from my high school English classes:

e·ruc·ta·tion (ĭ-rŭk-tā’shən, ē’rŭk-) n. the act or an instance of belching.

And another word that was brought up at work a couple of weeks ago:

con·tu·ma·cious (kon-too-mey-shuhs, -tyoo-) adj. stubbornly perverse or rebellious; willfully and obstinately disobedient.

We discussed this at our write-in last night. One of the attendees is a high school English teacher who was out of the room when we discussed these words. Naturally, when he came back, we asked him whether he had any students who were "contumaciously eructative". Without pausing for an instant, L. told us that no, he didn’t have any students who deliberately belched frequently just to be disruptive.

The conversation degenerated at that point, with jokes about people who were unable to belch suffering from "eructative dysfunction", and so on. We also figured that someone who went out of their way to disrupt a situation by belching out the alphabet was engaging in contumaciously eructative soliloquizing.

I’m not sure I can work that last phrase into a story but I’m about 100% sure I can use the word "eructation". It’s just that awesome.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 10:51 am and is filed under Just a Day in My Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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