Bowel

[Dr. Goodword]

• bowel •

Pronunciation: bæ-wêl • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. (usually plural bowels) The intestine, gut as, 'the large bowel'. 2. The deep interior of something, as 'the bowels of a ship'. 3. (Obsolete) Pity, compassion, feeling, 'heart', as 'to have bowels of mercies'.

Notes: We have tried several adjectives based on this noun. Until the end of the 17th century bowelly meant "compassionate". Bowelled means "having bowels or recesses". Only one verb has stuck: to disembowel someone is to eviscerate them.

In Play: Today's Good Word is most often heard in the plural: "After dinner at Maud Lynn Cook's the bowels of the diners created a borborygmic symphony." In figurative use, bowel means not merely "interior" as most dictionaries proclaim, but "deepest interior": "Friedrich can always come up with some insult from the bowels of that perverse mind of his."

Word History: In Middle English this word was spelled buel or bouel, borrowed from French boel or bouel. It was a reduction of late Latin botellus "pudding, sausage", which on the street had already come to mean "small intestine". Botellus was the diminutive of botulus "sausage", which went into the making of botulism, the name of a food poisoning caused by sausage-shaped bacteria. Provençal and Italian kept the T in botellus, but reduced it to D, producing Provençal budel and Italian budello "intestines". French also had a word that simply reduced the T to D, but mysteriously replacing the L with N: boudin "blood sausage". English apparently borrowed this word as pudding. In the past pudding was a word that commonly referred to the stuffing inside intestine casings of sausage, e.g. English liver pudding. The visual similarity then led to the switch from savory flavor to sweetness. (I wouldn't blame George Kovac if he couldn't stomach the absence of appreciation for his suggestion of today's surprising Good Word. So, thank you, George.)

[George Kovac]

I thank the kind Dr. Goodword, though I have mixed feelings about my name being associated with bowels.

What fascinates me about the word is Dr. Goodword’s definition #3, a meaning I first learned last month in an opinion piece about a current political imbroglio. In laying a foundation for his advice, the writer, whose prose tends to the purple, said this: “I spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about Oliver Cromwell’s famous letter to the Church of Scotland in which he implored, ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.’”

That quote from 1650 was dramatic, and, to 21st century ears, kind of gross. So I looked up Cromwell’s original letter and found his concluding sentence was worse: “And no marvel if you deal thus with us, when indeed you can find in your hearts to conceal from your own people the Papers we have sent you; who might thereby see and understand the bowels of our affections to them, especially to such among them as fear the Lord.” That’s really gross.

How do we choose body parts for metaphors? Some are obvious: “the long arm of the law;” “get a leg up;” “elbowed his way onto the committee;” “lip service;” “fingered him for the crime.” But what of interior organs? A brave person “has guts’ or “intestinal fortitude.” A coward is “lily-livered.” A vitriolic person “vents spleen.” Rude people have a lot of gall. In Cromwell’s time “bowel” was considered the locus of pity, tenderness, or courage.

And why hearts? The ancient Greeks thought the liver was the seat of the soul and human feelings. But no one today would sing “I left my liver in San Francisco.” (Nice alliteration, though.) The punishment inflicted on Prometheus makes no sense unless we understand that ancient hepatic metaphor—again, substitute heart for liver and modern readers will better understand the story. There is a good discussion of the etymology of names for liver, from Prometheus to the present day, prepared by the National Institutes of Health—with tongue only slightly in cheek. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3747976/

Thank you, gentle readers, from the bowels of my affection.