The Sofa did a Fart

Book cover My brother stuffs his dinner in the sofa and a week later... Phew!

The Macquarie Dictionary calls it 'an emission of wind from the anus, especially an audible one'. Rude Readers interrogated friends for the synonyms they used at home and put the frequent names in The Sofa Did a Fart (Volume 2) poppy, fluff, bottom-burp, fluff, stink. We had lots more that we didn't use. The story comes from three sources - an actual event where kids stuffed their dinner into the sofa cushions, a container of take-away Indian food that got lost under a car seat for too long and the joke about blaming the dog for the stink. In this Rude Reader people sit on the sofa a week later and say "Some one did a ...." Finally the dog gets the blame, but it's left for the child to infer. The teaching points are that one thing may have several names - synonyms, and that the choice of the right word varies with the speaker's social role - pragmatics. Do aunts say "fart" or "poppies"! What will the teacher say?