Flatulence

Flatulence is the expulsion of gas from the intestines via the anus, commonly referred to as farting. Flatus is the medical word for gas generated in the stomach or bowels. A proportion of intestinal gas may be swallowed environmental air, and hence flatus is not entirely generated in the stomach or bowels. The scientific study of this area of medicine is termed flatology.

Quotes

• Awè bleteth after lomb,
    Lhouth after calvè cu;
  Bulluc sterteth, buckè verteth,
    Murie sing cuccu!
  • Anonymous, "Sumer is icumen in" (MS. Harley 978, f.11v)

• This Nicholas anon leet flee a fart,
  As greet as it had been a thonder-dent.
  • Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Miller's Tale" (ed. Skeat)

• A man may break a word with you, sir; and words are but wind;
  Ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind.
  • William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors, 3, 1

• GLENDOWER: I say the earth did shake when I was born. [...]
  The heavens were all on fire, the earth did tremble.
  HOTSPUR: O, then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire
  And not in fear of your nativity.
  Diseasèd nature oftentimes breaks forth
  In strange eruptions. Oft the teeming earth
  Is with a kind of colic pinched and vexed
  By the imprisoning of unruly wind
  Within her womb, which for enlargement striving
  Shakes the old beldam earth and topples down
  Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth
  Our grandma earth, having this distemperature,
  In passion shook.
  • William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, 3, 1

• CLOWN: Are these, I pray you, wind instruments?
  FIRST MUSICIAN: Ay marry are they, sir.
  CLOWN: O, thereby hangs a tail.
  FIRSTMUSICIAN: Whereby hangs a tail, sir?
  CLOWN: Marry, sir, by many a wind instrument that I know.
  • William Shakespeare, Othello, 3, 1