Bart King - The Big Book of Gross Stuff

• mucus

• dandruff

• tweets from my Twitter

Dude, thats gross.

I bet you have heard someone say this recently. No? Then read this! A man from Belgium named Wim Delvoye made a machine out of thirty-three feet of laboratory tubes, along with various containers and gauges. The machine has a hole at both ends. To activate it, a cook feeds a meal into one end, and the big machine starts grinding up the food and moving it along.

Spectators then watch as the food makes stops at six vats of acids and enzymes. Finally, it works its way to the end of the process, where it comes out in a brown log.

And thats when everyone starts taking lots of photos.

Yep, its a mechanical digestive system! But can you explain to me why people would stare in fascination at a machine that does the EXACTSAMETHING that they can do?

Because its gross!

No one ever says so, but gross stuff is sort of magical. Nasty things are like magnets that repel and attract us at the same time. Once our disgust is activated, we get a strong feeling of revulsion; we might start breathing through our mouth or look away from the gross thing in question. But at the same time, we cant help sneaking a glance (or a sniff) to see if that nasty thing is still oozing, stinking, or pulsating. (Yeah, pulsating is good!)

Spot the Pattern!

Did you know that nastify (to make nasty) is an actual word? Neither did I! See if you can spot what all these words have in common! (Besides being gross, I mean.)

Do you see it? One way or another, all of these words are wet, or at least damp. And there are a lot of them. The only dry gross words I can think of are scabby and a few words that mean filthy (e.g., dirty, grimy, grubby). Then there are general-purpose gross words like vile,noxious, and abhorrent. But other than that, gross means wet!

Still dont believe it? A Web site called Visual Thesaurus asked its readers to rate how much they like or dislike certain words. And the second-most-hated word was moist. (A friend once said that she dislikes cake mixes that are advertised as being extra-moist because that basically means super-dank!) Oh, and the most-hated word of all was hate. So a lot of people hate hate.[]

Part of the appeal is that anything really gross is thought of as off-limits. And anything off-limits is immediately tantalizing. So it works like this: Dont look! Hey, I told you not to look!

Isnt that weird? No other animal is fascinated by gross stuff, because no other animal ever gets disgusted! If, for example, a dog wants to avoid something putrid, it just steps to the side and continues on with its life. What it wont do is start jumping around and shouting, Oh, my, that dead squirrel is loathsome!

So apparently only humans feel the emotion of disgust. And it really is an emotion , just like love or hate, or like that feeling you get when a person has a piece of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of his shoe and everyone is laughing, but the guy is totally cluelesswhats that emotion called? Oh yeah: relief that its not you.

Now, think about how powerfully your emotions can affect you. If youre really happy, you laugh. If youre really sad (did someone give you this book as a gift?), you cry.

ambisinistrous: Clumsy; the opposite of ambidextrous.

anonymuncule: A generic little person.

bifurcate: To separate something into two parts.

coccyx: A tailbone. You have one.

corpuscle: A small cell, usually a blood cell.

debag: To remove someones pants as a joke.[]

eumorphous: Well formed, as in, Dad, this meat loaf is eumorphous.