Interesting Etymological Discovery

Heading home after dropping a teammate off at their house, I heard an interesting discussion on a late night NPR program, the BBC-America show Americana, about the origins of many strange phrases and words in American English.

It was a discussion of some of the obscure discoveries the writer of a book on the subject had made, like a "Californian prayer book" is a deck of cards and an "Arkansas toothpick" is a knife with an extremely long blade, and is meant to connote that an opponent is armed with one and has the upper hand in a conflict.

There were a few more, but the one that really stuck with me was a word that she included in her book just for the fellas, a word she knew we'd get a kick out of: "fart-knocker".

Anyone relatively my age and gender who had MTV as a kid and like to play with matches remembers quite fondly two idiots who made the word "fart-knocker" a regular member of our everyday lexicon.

The compound word comes from the South in the early nineteenth century. It means, essentially, a nasty fall from a horse, one bad enough to knock the wind out of you.

Apparently, their wind was different from how we understand that idiom today.