Favorite Words

“Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.  Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.” ~Theodore Dreiser, 1900

In my last blog post, I wrote about the words, cellar door. This leads me to a discussion of my favorite word—borborygmi, the medical term for stomach growling that is audible without the use of a stethoscope. Borborygmi slips off my tongue, like ice cream.

According to Wikipedia, the word borborygmic has been used in literature. In Ada, Vladimir Nabokov wrote, “All the toilets and waterpipes in the house had been suddenly seized with borborygmic convulsions.” Eliza Fenwick wrote in Long Way Down, “The room was very quiet, except for its borborygmic old radiator.”

I don’t know why I am so fascinated by it, but apparently I am not alone—someone told me that her friend named his boat The Borborygmi. She also told me that her friend had a heart attack and died on his boat. After she told me that, it didn’t seem appropriate to mention that technically, he should have named his boat The Borborygmus, since borborygmi is plural.