Regurgitate -- Back So Soon?

Bacteria and viruses fascinate the heck out of me. These tiny, invisible creatures can invade a human body -- literally an entire planet to their diminutive armies -- and within a relatively short time wreak such havoc that said human finds herself out of control, muscles and organs churning in ways that a planet under alien bombardment in a sci-fi movie looks like -- a heaving, exploding, debris-spewing mess. Sure, the dazzling and incredibly intricate array of defensive arsenal that is the immune response also boggles my mind, but until it can rally itself to fight back, the body responds with the most primitive and brutal of tools to try to expel the invaders, including regurgitation. (Let's just say that personal reasons bring this word to mind this evening.)

Regurgitate is a word that works especially well for conversations amongst polite company, such as discerning blog readers. Use of the term -- given its well known biological context of sustenance of hungry chicks by doting parents -- conveys all the gruesome imagery of partially digested food without your having to describe any such gory details directly. Certainly there's a colorful array of synonyms to choose from that can convey such imagery more immediately, but since anyone who has raised an infant, cleaned up kitty's hairballs, or attended a particularly celebratory New Year's Eve bash can rattle off a string of these with no help from any blog, I'll forgo the laundry list here.

Rather, it's more interesting (and better for the constitution of someone trying to put heaving innards out of her mind) to consider the additional definitions that regurgitate boasts.

In several dictionaries, its foremost definition is some variation of, "regarding fluids, air or gases, to gush, rush, or pour back again." Though the New Oxford American Dictionary lists the principal definition as "bring (swallowed food) up again to the mouth" in the biological context. But given that the grandfather of English language usage, the Oxford English Dictionary, lists the non-guts-related definition first, it seems this word has had a broader usage history. Other definitions given are variations of, "to pour or cast out again from a receptacle, especially the stomach," so it's clear also that the term's popularity in the biological context is prominent as well.

Eventually, some clever mind conceived a more figurative use of the term as evidenced by the definition, "repeat information from memory," usually in the sense of haven't really having comprehended or considered it. Now, that's some creative play with terminology! Forget partially digested food -- now what we have tumbling out is a mishmash of barely tasted, hardly chewed, unabsorbed bytes and bits of facts and data, perhaps with a bit of bile mixed in. "Ooh" and "eww," both at the same time.

Pronounced: [rē-gûr'jĭ-tāt']
Roots: re + Latin gurgitāre, meaning to engulf or flood (from gurges, gurgit- meaning whirlpool)