The Paris Project

Long Blog, But Special

Today I would like to share a draft of an article I'm writing about linguistics. It's longer than my blog entries, and I won't feel bad if you don't have the time to read it. A number of you offered interesting ideas on fundamentalism that I want to think about over the weekend, and post about again next week. Peace to all today!

Fifty Ways to Lose Your Lunch

Language reveals a lot about a culture. The Greeks, for example, had four words for love, distinguishing between erotic love (eros), family love (storge), friendship (philia), and unselfish love (agape). American English uses just one word sloppily for all these different emotions. Spanish speakers distinguish between conocer and saber, two ways to know. Again, English has just one word. When I searched briefly for English words for penis, however, I found thirty two. Thirty nine for sexual intercourse. Four hundred and ninety four for marijuana.

Overlooking my native tongue’s obvious lack of class, I offer this proposal to improve the English language. During five early months of a recent pregnancy, I vomited at least 400 times. I was unable to communicate the meaning of this experience to others because of the linguistic limitations of English. American English offers its users many words for vomit. We commonly use puke, hurl, retch, spew, ralph, hurl, upchuck, and the clinical regurgitate, emesis, or to be sick. Some, especially those who drink too much, have made an art of vomit language: driving the porcelain bus, blowing chunks, tossing your cookies, losing your lunch, talking to ralph on the big white phone, and, new to me, singing psychedelic praises to the depths of the china bowl.

Complexity in vomit vocabulary displays the intelligence and spirit of the American people, but one area has been left entirely unexplored: the nature of vomit itself. Similar to using just one word for the many types of love, it is sadly inadequate to use just one word for the varieties of vomit. Pregnant women and other frequent hurlers could, perhaps, elicit more sympathy and care if they could more clearly explain precisely what they are vomiting. On the international scene, Americans would also appear to be a more intelligent people if we could demonstrate superior linguistic innovation. We’re falling behind in science and math, but I think crass linguistics could be our niche.

What follows is the beginning of a dictionary of vomit. It is based largely on my experience, and I acknowledge it as just a small step forward. Notably absent are entries about drunken vomit, and vomit related to various diseases. These areas should be explored by experts, which I am not. I’ll just offer what I know: pregnancy vomits and mild food poisoning vomit. I sincerely hope other writers and expert retchers will use this vocabulary, develop and extend it, and so contribute to our culture.

Bile hurl. Bile hurl contains nothing but bile, the slippery and bright yellow acid in the stomach. It is a relatively weak vomit, but usually comes at the end of a series of more aggressive pukes. It looks fairly innocent, but bile hurl has a powerful taste because the taste buds for bitter flavors are on the back of the tongue, the vomit superhighway. Bile hurl also eats away at the throat, making the voice scratchy or absent altogether. Bile hurl is sometimes accompanied by a weak voice whispering, “I’m so sick.”

Food-refusal vomit. When the body refuses food immediately, puke consists of the food in its original form, moistened. It’s hardly disturbed, and could be eaten again later in a pinch. Food-refusal vomit may be produced up to 90 minutes after ingestion, in my experience, and perhaps even later for others. The corner of a saltine eaten while horizontal, for example, may emerge whole and unscathed after an hour and a half of rest. When experiencing food-refusal vomiting, it is wise to choose foods based on the ease of vomiting them later. Granola, for example, is too dry and sharp, but cheerios are mild and smooth. Tomato-based soups produce burning hot acid, but clear soups swim upstream like salmon. Coffee produces the same sour result as tomato soup, but black tea and green tea bring only a not entirely unpleasant warmth that rises quickly from belly to mouth. Meat is heavy, requiring strong muscle contractions to work against gravity, but vegetables are slippery and light. Despite what I once suspected, eating sweets does not make food-refusal vomit taste better, not even if the sweets are Ding Dongs or gas station chocolate donettes. The taste buds for sweet flavors are on the tip of the tongue, so sweetness cannot be tasted when food enters the mouth from the back.

False emesis (commonly known as dry heaves). When the body is too weak to really puke, it retches to no effect. Totally dry, not even water or bile. False emesis can be identified early by the quality of muscle contractions, and if correctly diagnosed, you can just stay in bed or watching TV while retching. If wrongly diagnosed, of course, you’ll be sorry. Even if you look yourself straight in the eyes in the mirror and sternly say “Stop playing!”, you cannot stop false emesis. You just have to ride it out.

Orally contained vomit. The frequency of orally contained vomit is determined by the modesty of the puker. When my friend Julie went to work, for example, she was separated from the bathroom by a long hallway. She puked in her mouth and calmly walked to the bathroom, without revealing it to her co-workers. I, on the other hand, would rather puke in my hands and carry it to the bathroom in front of everyone. Fortunately, I work at a school and was pregnant during the summer, so I didn’t face this challenge.

Rotten ralph. Rotten ralph is a non-pregnancy vomit, produced by mild food poisoning. A special form, in my experience, is meat cooked with tomato-based sauce. The throat and back of the tongue are sensitive to the unique taste of rotten, partially digested meat, and acidic sauce adds an unmistakable throat burn. Ground beef enchiladas and picnic chicken marinated in tomato sauce provided me with two outstanding examples. Frequently originating at picnics and potlucks, rotten ralph is rarely found alone. Usually it is part of a double orifice elimination.

Sleep spew. Recording this form of vomit is extremely important because it is rare. I sometimes woke up out of a dead sleep, fully convulsing. This type of vomit was handy for the pregnancy itself, which seemed to want to torture me 24 hours a day. When I woke up retching, I said in my mind, “You don’t have to throw up. You’re just walking to the bathroom. Just walking. It’s OK.” Mind control works for about 15-20 seconds, just enough time to get to the sink.

Surprise spew. Sometimes it seems that, despite weeks of daily vomiting, this day will be the day it ends. You eat something, it stays down for 15 minutes, and you’re so pleased that you keep eating. You eat numerous foods, say Doritos, a Ding Dong, milk, and a peach. Then the body sabotages the mind with a surprise spew, something you never saw coming. It’s frequently embarrassing, like the time I spewed a half-digested apple onto a wall in my doctor’s office. Another time I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and Coke, and surprise spewed. I threw up the sandwich, the color from the Coke (somehow it separates from the liquid), and something lime green that I never identified. This is the only pregnancy puke that I think about months later, wondering about those green bits.

Waterretch. Water is a vomit trigger for many pregnant women. This is a simple vomit, though the first few times will be mixed with the bitter taste of bile. If you’re the kind of fool I was, you will continue sipping water, thinking that your body will prefer the third or fourth swallow. The third and fourth vomit will not contain any bile. This is the only vomit that tastes precisely the same in both directions. Though it seems easy and trouble-tree, waterretch is not to be trifled with. Dehydration sets in quickly and will land you in the hospital.

These are only eight words for the nature of vomit, based on an informal investigation with a sample size of one. May it be the beginning of a vocabulary bonanza. There are about a quarter million distinct words in the English language. Let’s make it 250,008 and counting.