One morning I stood at the sign-in sheet for late arrivals at Doug or Adam’s (not saying which) school office. “Time in,” the first column read. I entered 9:15. “Child’s name.” I entered that. “Reason for tardiness.” I looked at the entries for other late students: “dr’s appt”, “orthodontist”, one “overslept”. That last one came close to what I had in mind, but it still didn’t quite fit. I’d woken up my son in plenty of time to get ready for school. I wrote in the slot, “Dawdling”.
That’s not what I call it at home. There, the term is farting around, a term I learned from Dad years ago when he would tell people (I don’t seem to recall exactly who) to stop doing it.
The Oxford English Dictionary‘s earliest attestation is from 1900, although instead of farting around, it’s farting about, from the English Dialect Dictionary:
Go bon tha! thoo’s allus farten aboot, thoo’s warse ner a hen wi’ egg.
Fart around has been around since at least 1952, when it appears in from Leon Uris’s novel Battle Cry:
If the Army wants to fart around for six weeks, it’s their business.
I got this citation from the Wordwizard Clubhouse forum on word origins and meanings, in a post from just last month by Ken Greenwald, who attributes it to the Historical Dictionary of [American] Slang. Ken’s post was actually even more useful, because it also talked about our back-yard neighbors’ variant of fart around, the longer and alliterative fiddle-fart around, attested from the early 1970s. I assumed it was an idiom blend of fiddle around and fart around, and that’s what Greenwald’s sources say, too. (He cites HDAS and three other sources, but it’s unclear which one(s) offered this etymology.)
I said that at home I used the phrasal verb fart around, but actually that’s not entirely true. I use fart around when my wife isn’t present. She hates the word fart; it’s another of her word aversions like the one she has to the word pee. So out of necessity, I came up with circumflatulate as an alternative. I’m not claiming to have invented the word. A Google check confirmed that the word’s been around for a few years before I independently created it. One attestation on Google Groups is from 1994.
Having the verb circumflatulate at my disposal, I can certainly say, “Stop circumflatulating!”, but what would be even more useful would be a way to a noun form so that I can tell the boys before they get dressed in the morning, or go to brush their teeth at night not to circumflatulate. Don’t circumflatulate would work, but I wanted something that would fit in the template No __________! There’s always the gerund, of course: No circumflatulating!. But for variety, I’ve sometimes said, “No circumflatulation!” Circumflatulation? Why not circumflatulence, to fill out the analogy of flatulate : flatulence :: circumflatulate : _______? I find hardly any hits for circumflatulence. I guess it’s because flatulence is a personal characteristic, and so I would think of circumflatulence as a tendency to circumflatulate. Circumflatulation is the act of circumflatulating.
Having these Latin roots to work with not only has allowed me to tell Doug and Adam to quit farting around without offending my wife’s sensibilities; it’s allowed me to talk about farting around with greater precision. Not just because where Anglo-Saxon-derived English has just farting around, Latin-derived English has circumflatulating, circumflatulation, and circumflatulence — also because fart around doesn’t easily allow for an adjectival form: *He’s a really {farting-around, around-farting} dude. With the Latinate verb, I can easily generate an adjectival form, and tell you that Doug and Adam are rather circumflatulent at times. And with that, maybe I’ve succeeded in creating a word after all!
UPDATE, Nov. 17, 2010: The same goes for agentive nouns. The best you can do with fart around is the graceless farter-arounder, but with circumflatulate, the easy and obvious choice is circumflatulator
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When I moved to central Ohio, a three-story downtown mall called City Center was the place to go. Across the street from it was an old-school five-story department store, a locally famous business named Lazarus. Connecting the two was an enclosed overhead walkway. I heard so many people say they’d done something or other or gotten such-and-such from City Center that I went to see the place myself. It was pleasant enough, although I didn’t appreciate having to pay to park there. Sixteen years later, City Center is an empty hulk, though it’s still open for people to walk through on their way to the Capital Theatre or the Hyatt on Capital Square after parking in the now-free garage. The Lazarus store across the street is closed, too. (Another Lazarus store has survived, at one of the suburban retail centers that helped kill City Center, but after a merger with Macy’s, it underwent a Cougar-to-Mellencamp-style name change, from Lazarus to Lazarus Macy’s to just Macy’s.) And as for the walkway between the old Lazarus and City Center, I have learned that it has long been considered an eyesore and a scary, gloomy barrier separating the Capital district from the southern part of downtown. I learned that from a newspaper story last week, which said that the walkway is scheduled to be demolished. In announcing the demolition of the walkway, Columbus mayor Michael Coleman also offered some comments about what should become of City Center, which the newspaper reported:
