Friday, November 25, 2011

The gospel according to puke

This week's Sunday School reading includes one of my favorite funny verses, Rev. 3:16: "So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth."

To me, this proves that the word "spue" (or spew) is never not funny, regardless of context. I'm guessing this feeling is universal, though there's a slight chance I'm just immature.

There's a guy on my team at work whose last name is "Barfuss," so he's heard hundreds of vomit euphemisms over the course of his life. From time to time our team will share our favorites as we collaborate on projects on Google Wave (which, sadly, is going away early next year--I blame the 99.9999% of you Gmail account holders who never used Wave), including earlier this week, when some all-time greats like "technicolor yawn" and "liquid laughter" came up (so to speak) in the conversation.

While puke jokes are almost universally funny, there's one vomit-related phrase I really don't like. Here's an excerpt from a blog post I wrote three years ago this month:

...the purpose of this post is to express my displeasure with the oft-used phrase (and its variants) "I just threw up in my mouth a little bit."
Apparently it's been annoying people for quite some time. But these people seem to despise the pretentiousness of the saying. It bothers me for a different reason: why say it that way, when that is the only place you can throw up? Yes, sometimes the throw up escapes the mouth and sometimes it doesn't (is there a magma/lava equivalent for puke, or is it always the same?), but the mouth is always involved. If someone ever vomits out of, say, their armpit, then I want the description to include the body part. Otherwise, it's not necessary.

One of the comments on that post included what is probably my favorite barf replacement term: "mouth squirts." Admit it, you just laughed a little in your mouth.

Anyone else have a euphemism to add to the list? Just spew it out.

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