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EXTRAS: linguaspectrum.com Here is a subject you won’t find in any detail in any of your English textbooks. It’s strange really, when you consider that each and every one of us does this at least once or twice a day. Yet many people, and the English in particular, are rather embarrassed when talking about going to the toilet. The English, being somewhat reluctant to admit that they do go to the toilet, have invented many expressions to sanitise this rather natural bodily function. Perhaps it is this embarrassment about our natural bodily functions that makes toilet humour so popular in Hollywood movies and for stand-up comedians. But this is not a modern phenomenon, this aversion to accept our body’s natural processes. Around 1781, Benjamin Franklin wrote an essay entitled, Fart Proudly, in which he suggested to the Royal Academy of Brussels that research ought to be undertaken into ways of improving the odour of the human fart. Raucously funny, the essay has nevertheless been excluded from most published collections of Franklin’s writings. I fully expect this video to upset my more genteel viewers, so don’t be shy in complaining about the content in the comments below the video. Let’s take a look at some of this vocabulary that you won’t easily find elsewhere. When I was in the military, I once told our appalling army chef that he was a genius. He was a genius, I told him, because it took the human body 24 hours to turn good food into shit, whereas he could do it in …