“It cannot but come as a surprise that against the background of countless important words whose origin has never been discovered some totally insignificant verbs and nouns have been traced successfully and convincingly to the very beginning of Indo-European. Fart (‘not in delicate use’) looks like a product of our time, but it has existed since time immemorial. Even the nuances have not been lost: one thing is to break wind loudly (farting); quite a different thing is to do it quietly (the now obscure ‘fisting’). (This fist has nothing to do with fist ‘clenched fingers’ and consequently isn’t related to fisting, a sexual activity requiring, as we are warned, great caution and a lot of tender experience.)” -Anatoly Liberman traces the etymology of the word “fart”
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“It cannot but come as a surprise that against the background of countless important words whose origin has never been discovered some totally insignificant verbs and nouns have been traced successfully and convincingly to the very beginning of Indo-European. Fart (‘not in delicate use’) looks like a product of our time, but it has existed since time immemorial. Even the nuances have not been lost: one thing is to break wind loudly (farting); quite a different thing is to do it quietly (the now obscure ‘fisting’). (This fist has nothing to do with fist ‘clenched fingers’ and consequently isn’t related to fisting, a sexual activity requiring, as we are warned, great caution and a lot of tender experience.)”

-Anatoly Liberman traces the etymology of the word “fart”

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