Word Of The Day: “pwaft”
I suspect that “pwaft” needs no definition, but I will let you supply your own in the comments section for a while and then formally update the entry.
Update: “Pwaft” is both a noun and a verb, for those of you who care about such things.
pwaft: n. Deriv. “poo-waft” — the odor of poo, usu. noted via sitting bolt upright, sniffing, and checking the soles of one’s shoes for flattened dog feces. Can also immediately follow a feline galloping past after visiting the litter. “Hobey, what the he– augh, pwaft.” “I would put down our picnic blanket here, but I’m getting some pwaft.”
pwaft: v. To create a miasma of poo or poo-like smell; to fume, as in a fingerprint chamber. “I wouldn’t go in there; the litter box is pwafting.” Adjs. pwafty, pwaftish; sometimes pwaftig (tm Mikkipedia).
Tags: our friend English poot!
A spectacular fall that’s more embarrassing than dangerous? “I made one hell of a pwaft over by the bathrooms…scratched my knee, broke a shoe, AND the Object of My Affection was there to see it all. My night is complete.”
Oh, wait, I just saw the tags…hee, nevermind :)
The inescapable wall of smell that results from a specific type of stinky fart; performing the act of creating said wall.
Sometimes used colloquially to describe the sound the fart itself makes.
Pwaft – the act of waving the air around one’s person in order to disperse one’s [ahem] wind before anyone notices you did it and – worse, suspects you.
“Whoa, dude. I had to pwaft that out of here because the boss is due in here shortly.”
Deliberately breaking wind while on the move to torture offenders without implicating yourself.
“I pwafted the rude lady on her cell phone in booth behind me on the way to pay my bill”
See also: cropdusting.
See, I was thinking it was waving the air not to disguise the smell, but to spread it around with the cheerful intention of grossing out the people around you — but then my mind often works like a 12 year old boy’s so…
Definitely has to be onomatopoeia. My late Akita sounded like this when he did make a sound. Usually he was not kind enough to warn anyone.
Clearly this is a combination of everyone’s answer. Which qualifies it for inclusion in the AHD because of the prescriptive and descriptive elements, I believe. Corpus linguistics, indeed.
Hee hee hee.
Also, thanks for the tag, because it led me to a post I’d never read (no! I didn’t believe it either!) and I have laughed myself into hiccups. I shall go over there and comment, too. Because it’s too appropriate not to.
It’s actually a contraction of “poo-waft”: specifically, it’s the whiff of actual poo. Farts are frequently mistaken for pwaft, but pwaft is pretty narrow; you’re downwind of dogshit. The crop-dusting-adjacent guesses cracked me up, though.
Good for use at the zoo: “Yeah, the monkeys are a riot, but the pwaft drove me out into the welcoming embrace of the Butterfly House.”
It’s a beautiful day so I’m lounging on the grass in Central Park. But there is an unfortunate odor pwafting my way. Time to relocate.
I foresee this word getting a lot of use in my household.
“Man, that’s some pwaft in the living room! Did you remember to spray the bathroom, dear?”
Oh man that made me laugh. I’m gonna incorporate that into my daily lexicon with 4 cats and 2 dogs…pwaft!
With two currently-fart-OBSESSED boys, I suspect this word will soon make its way into common usage. It would have done so before now, except that sound is a key factor in their obsession. They’ve all but marked our hardwood floors with reverb dents.