Researchers hope to find a more appropriate synonym for "feces"

Addra Bhatt is a professor at the University of North Carolina State University (UNC) School of Medicine, where he works on cancer and bacteria, as well as on the interaction between drugs and the gut. Recently, however, she launched a new proposal in the Journal of Gastroenterology, hoping to take a more appropriate synonym for experimental investigations related to feces.

The nature of the work determines that Aadra Bhatt should often deal with feces in order to gain insight into the mysteries. But when she wrote the research report, she was guilty—because it was difficult to find the exact words to describe the experiment.

In real life, people have countless informal names for feces in and out of the body. But in the relevant experiments carried out on test tubes and petri dishes, which words should be used in the final point?

Aadra Bhatt said helplessly: "I have to use multiple phrases to describe specific parts, such as 'the fecal extract of the mouse we studied'. But this is too tiring, so I thought about it. Brand new words."

Given that many of the words in biology came from Latin, Aadra Bhatt decided to start with this and invited structural biologist Matt Redinbo and classic scholar Luca Grillo to help.

Interestingly, they found a lot of words in Latin to describe feces. After various trade-offs, they removed options such as merda or laetamen (feces in the mountains).

In the end, the team chose the fimus, a term that describes human and animal droppings. And the Romans seem to like the word very much, which is particularly literary.

For more information about this study, please go to the Gastroenterology Journal. The original title is:

"In Fimo": A Term Proposed for Excrement Examined Experimentally