This blog entry is mainly about a billboard that says, “I pooted” (which I too find deliciously humorous) but that’s not the reason I’m linking to it. The reason I’m linking to it is because it confirms something which I had begun to ascribe to an overactive imagination.

Boy howdy, I’ll never, ever forget when I was in seventh grade and my old pal Marc ran up to me in our middle school library with this huge Cheshire grin on his face and said “Timmy, Timmy, guess what? I looked up ‘fart’ in the library dictionary and it said that it’s a ‘minor explosion between the legs’!!!!”

Sure enough, Marc was correct. Both our middle school library and my Grandpa Cook had matching Funk and Wagnalls unabridged dictionaries—yes, those ginormous, foot-thick ‘Wildebeast’ editions that I was physically incapable of lifting off of their wooden display stands. My buddies and I used to have so much fun looking up ‘dirty words’ and tittering wildly at the Victorian definitions we’d discover.

No foolin’—that dictionary defined fart as a “minor explosion between the legs.” Good lord. It has been 25 years since I performed that lookup. Time flies when you’re havin’ fun.

I had begun to doubt my childhood memories of the definition of fart in a dictionary we had at school, but this confirms it. Amazingly enough, some dictionary editors somewhere agreed to define fart as “an explosion between the legs.”