The more you eat them, the more you flatus

I watched an episode of MythBusters last week that tested myths that had to do with farting. But they never used the word fart. In what I think was a (successful) effort to be both funny and inoffensive, they referred to the passed gas as flatus throughout the entire show, even when they were collecting Adam’s flatus as he sat in a bathtub of cold water wearing Speedo-style swimtrunks.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines a flatus as: “Gas generated in or expelled from the digestive tract, especially the stomach or intestines.” It gives the etymology: “Latin flātus, meaning wind, fart, from flāre, meaning to blow.”