Rob ‘Mule’ Hughes writes of being plagued by the flatulence of fellow concert goers. “Not a little farty” is how he describes them.

‘Fart’ was a word that was absent from our house as a child. My dad had another word for it:

Brammit.

Of course, given that it was a Gaelic word, the spelling was probably more like ‘brachmaight.’

And brachmaight was a noun, not a verb.

One did not brachmaight, one made a brachmaight.

In the Mule Hughes context, it might be used thusly:

“I saw Dysrhythmia last night.”

“How was it?”

“Not bad at all, but the people in the crowd around me were ridiculous. They issued one brachmaight after another.”

I was surprised as a child to find the word was not widely used.

“Didn’t you call them brachmaights in your house?” I asked my much older brother-in-law on one occasion.

He shook his head casually, inhaling on his cigarette as he did so.

“In our house it was just a good old-fashioned F-A-R-T.”