Regurgitate means “barf,” “puke,” “throw-up.”

Please don’t do any of that at New Years.

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The existence of a word like regurgitate implies the existence of another word, gurgitate.

I looked in the Oxford English Dictionary and sure enough, there it is, and also ingergitate. Both at one time meant “to swallow,” and particularly “to drink,” sometimes excessively.

Yet to the extent that this unusual word gurgitate is still used (there was one reference as recently as 1963) it is now supposed to mean “swallowed up as if dropped into a whirlpool.” And it is from whirlpool that all the words come because the Latin word for whirlpool was gurges.

The first time the word regurgitate was used in English—as far as we can tell from the written record—was by Henry More in 1653.

This was one of those instances where old Latin words were being drawn into use in English by great thinkers trying to express ideas that they found hard to articulate using only English words.

More wasn’t talking about human regurgitation but about fluid flow.

It wasn’t until 1753 that regurgitate was used to describe vomiting.  According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography—which means National of England—Henry More was considered “one of the leading philosophers of his time.”  He’d been brought up in a strict Calvinist faith and to some extent rebelled against it.

His philosophy was still very devout, but he felt there was room for everyone in the tent.  His approach was called latitudinarianism because it gave people lots of latitude in their beliefs.

I think that’s a nice, broad-minded attitude to go into the new year with, don’t you?

Just another reminder that there’ll be no episodes until Friday.

Happy New Year.