Do you like to squirt ketchup on your chips?

Next time you are about to do just that, you may want to forget what you are about to read…

The very first sense of the word ‘squirt’, way back in the 1400s, was ‘diarrhoea’. To ‘squirt’, meanwhile, was used of gushing water but also meant to ‘let loose diarrhoea’ — ejecting it quite forcefully, in fact.

None of which you really wanted to know, did you? You may never think of a water-squirter in quite the same way again.

By the way, the opposite of having the ‘squits’ (a shortening of ‘squirts’, in case you wanted to know), is to be constipated. You may have come across the word ‘soluble’ in your science lessons, when it means ‘dissolvable’. It hasn’t always meant quite that, though — it once described bowels that were ‘relaxed’ and free of constipation.

Er, let’s leave it there, shall we?