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Just out of curiosity, how widespread is usage of the word "zrrbt"? (Yes, that's the correct spelling!) It refers to making a fart-like sound by pressing your mouth against someone else's body (or your own, I suppose) & blowing, with a person's belly giving the loudest sound & tickling the other person the most. Some might call that a "belly blast," or something like that.
It has a definite etymology, since it came from an episode of The Cosby Show. The youngest daughter, Rudy Huxtable,asked her father, "What does Z-R-R-B-T spell?" Dr. Huxtable then said something like, "A 'zir-bit'? Oh, that's one of these!" (At which point he proceeded to show her.) Since I'd been doing that with my younger brother (seven years younger, & he was just a little kid at the time), we adopted the word.
A Google search turns up some hits, most of which seem to be on blogs, etc. I especially like this adorable picture of a mother lovingly zrrbting her beautiful baby daughter on her cheek:
I'm sure it has other spellings (and phonetic representations) and there are probably other words for this. It sounds like a family word to me. How many people do you know of (other than your family or the Cosby's) who use this term? Or was that what you wanted to know? I'm not familiar with the term myself. I might've heard “belly blast” though.
“zrrbt” : two syllables and no vowels; how interesting!
Wordsmith said:
I'm sure it has other spellings (and phonetic representations) and there are probably other words for this. It sounds like a family word to me. How many people do you know of (other than your family or the Cosby's) who use this term? Or was that what you wanted to know? I'm not familiar with the term myself. I might've heard “belly blast” though.
“zrrbt” : two syllables and no vowels; how interesting!
Well, considering the number of hits in the Google search, it seems a number of other people have adopted it, and, yes, I did want to know just how widespread it is. The "zrrbt" spelling is the one given in the show (I'm sure it was supposed to be Rudy just making up a string of letters), but, if it is / became widespread enough,I'm sure the spelling might become "normalized" to something like "zirbit" or "zerbit."
Wordsmith said:
I'm sure it has other spellings (and phonetic representations) and there are probably other words for this. It sounds like a family word to me. How many people do you know of (other than your family or the Cosby's) who use this term? Or was that what you wanted to know? I'm not familiar with the term myself. I might've heard “belly blast” though.
“zrrbt” : two syllables and no vowels; how interesting!
When my kids were little, we loved these, too. We spelled them "zrrbrrts" and called them "zerberts" (rhymes with "Herbert's"), because that's the way we heard Bill Cosby say it. We also had great fun verbing (and conjugating!) the noun. ~~JudiKaye
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