Sunday, September 30, 2018

A Ten Dollar Word

Tonight I was sitting on the couch using my laptop, and Pepper the cat was laying on the couch next to me. All of a sudden I heard some loud rumblings coming from his general area and realized that it was his stomach gurgling!  I've never heard that happen before.


Pepper seemed to be a little embarrassed by all of the din coming from his body.  He jumped down from the couch and walked to the other side of the room, where he plopped down on the floor and glared at me.

Because I could, I immediately opened up a new browser tab and searched for "cat stomach gurgling". The first result of my search was the article Gurgling Sound in Cat's Stomach at Animalwised.  There I learned that the medical name for the sound was borborygmus.  That was actually more interesting to me than the actual causes of the problem, which could be anything from eating too fast to digestive tract disorders or inflammatory bowel disease.

Dictionary.com told me that, should I want to use the word in my next conversation, it was pronounced [bawr-buh-rig-muh s]. That's quite a mouthful.

Five years ago today: Cover Me

10 comments:

  1. Coincidence. We had a cat called Pepper. Every time he came near me I sneezed. I thought I was allergic to him, or his fur. The vet said, "No ... the cat is not allergic to you!" I saw a doctor instead. He said I was not allergic to the cat. We changed the cat's name to Salt and all was OK.

    God bless.

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  2. Thanks for the pronunciation. I read the first two syllables to be identical!

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    1. I needed to pronunciation written out, too. It wasn't intuitive by just looking at the word.

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  3. Learning new words is good for the brain. Some of the books I read to first graders have words that are definitely NOT first grade vocabulary. We practice those words. Last week the word was squabble, as the in "the children squabbled." In each class there was one child who remembered that word and pronounced it correctly. They got a star sticker.

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  4. LOL, if you had ever used that word in a sentence with me I probably would have looked at you like you had 2 heads. But now I know!

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    Replies
    1. Keep the word in your back pocket and pull it out if you ever want to impress someone....

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