fart in the face of, mock") is used in Horace (Sat. 1.9.70). Catullus also uses the noun in one of his poems (54). A rarer word, meaning "to fart silently", was . This is hinted at in Cicero's letter ad Fam. 9.22, where he says that the word is potentially obscene, in the same way as the word . The word is not recorded in Lewis and Short's Latin Dictionary and does not appear to have been used by any extant author. However, the Oxford Latin Dictionary quotes an inscription from a public bath in Ostia which says ("cunning Chilon taught how to fart silently"). Judging from derivatives in some of the daughter languages (see below), there was also a noun * "a silent fart", but no trace of this is found in the extant texts. The noise made by escaping flatulence was usually called , a word which could refer to "a noise" of various kinds, and the verb was used of breaking wind noisily. Martial writes of a certain man, who after an embarrassing incident of flatulence when praying in the temple of Jupiter, was careful in the future to take precautions: ("Whenever he wants to come to the Capitolium (to pray)he first heads for the toilets of Paterclusand farts ten or twenty times.But however much he takes precautions by breaking wind,he still salutes Jupiter with clenched buttocks.") Euphemisms In Petronius (47), in the speech of the vulgar millionaire Trimalchio, euphemisms and "do what helps one" are both used for relieving oneself of wind: ("And so if any of you wants to relieve himself (of wind), there's no need for him to be ashamed. Personally I think there's nothing worse than holding it in. And I never forbid anyone to relieve himself of wind even in the dining-room, and doctors forbid people to hold it in as well.") Etymology The antiquity of and its membership in the core inherited vocabulary is clear from its reduplicating perfect stem. It is cognate with Greek (perdomai), English fart, Bulgarian prdi, Polish pierdzieć, Russian пердеть (perdet), Lithuanian persti, Sanskrit pardate, and Avestan pərəδaiti, all of which mean the same thing. is clearly onomatopoeic. The Old Norse fisa may be compared, although the correspondence in sounds is not exact. In the Romance languages and English and survive in Romance. In French, the noun pet from pēditum and the derived verb péter (for earlier