Upchucking and Social Mobility

When I was a child I, like many children, was fascinated with processes of bodily elimination. But because I was a budding wordsmith, I was more interested in the names people gave to these processes rather than the products themselves. Since I have two younger brothers, who always seemed to be heaving something from their throats, I was most interested in words for vomiting. Luckily, our family, circa 1960, had three terms for this act: throwing up, being sick (to your stomach) or, more frequently, spitting up. I had heard the "bad boys" at school use terms like barf or puke, but we weren't permitted to speak that way at home. It was always something like, "Bobby just spit up on my dress," or "Chris is feeling sick to his stomach."

Indeed, as I have since learned, the terms "throw up" and "be sick (to one's stomach)" have a long history in English. Had I been exposed to the full array of "vomiting" terms at the time, the list would have included the following (with the year of first attestation in English as synonymous for throwing up): vomit (1422), purge (1390), cast (1300), disgorge (1477), retch (1888), spew (10th century), regurgitate (1753).

But the plethora of terms for throwing up in English at about 1960 didn't mean that we had enough of them. To the contrary. Just as the 1960s-1990s was an inventive period for phobias and various mental conditions, so that period also saw the generation of many new words for throwing up. This Internet list of 339 terms for puking just about covers the field, even though you can find other, even more extensive lists, online. I like the list I have linked above because the synonyms are put in alphabetical order. Thus, if you knew that puking had something do to with "blowing" something, you could easily scroll down the list and find some of the following synonymns for puking:

"blow, blow breakfast, blow chum, blow chow, blow chunks, blow your biscuits, blow foam, blow buckets of bile, blow doughnuts, blow lunch, blow groceries, blow a gasket, blow acid, blowing your beets, blowing liquid kisses to the china goddess.."

It is interesting that there is no "puke synonymn" for disgorging your dinner, as there is for breakfast and lunch (though I do see that "divulge dinner" is on the list). Maybe there is an avenue of creativity for you there. Some of these terms are hilarious, but I will leave you to discover your own favorites.

Returning to Family Life, Circa 1960

While spit up, throw up and be sick to your stomach seemed to suffice our family for many years, I remember my mother solemnly introducing a new term for puking in the early 1960s. It was upchucking. I don't know how she got the word, but I think she had heard it from her mother. Her mother and father lived near us in CT but had bought a place in Florida near Orlando in the early 1950s and used to go there every year to escape the harsh New England winters. Perhaps in their Mount Dora community they had run into people who used that term, and then my grandmother had dutifully told it to my mother, who now began to use it with us. From about 1962 on then, whenever we were sick to our stomach, my mother wanted to know if we were going to upchuck.

I had no idea at the time, but I now know, that upchuck was a term first attested in written English in 1960, even though its oral usage apparently went back to the 1920s. Here is what the OED says about the first attestation, in Wentworth & Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang.

"Up-chuck, upchuck, v.i., v.t. to vomit. Since c 1925... Considered a smart and sophisticated term c 1935, esp. when applied to sickness that had been induced by over-drinking."

Social Mobility

Only recently did it begin to dawn on me that when my mother began rigidly to enforce upchuck language, she did so for reasons of social mobility. Perhaps she didn't even realize this at the time, but since the word, according to the dictionary, was invented to give a "sophisticated" sound to this inelegant human activity, she was trying to demonstrate the sophistication that befitted our wealthy surroundings. For, in fact, my parents were really trying very hard to bring us up in a socio-economic environment that would launch us from the solidly middle-class to the upper-upper middle class, or beyond. My dad had grown up in rather impecunious circumstances on a farm in upstate New York, and my mother's upbringing was much more comfortable in Darien, CT, but when we moved to Darien in the mid-1950s it was so that we "kids" would "rub shoulders" with the children of Ivy League graduates and major corporate lawyers and business people. Indeed, in my parents' social circle was the editor of several NYC-published women's magazines, a reporter for the NY Times, a state Senator, and several Harvard grads. By Junior High I was hanging around with the son of the President of IBM as well as the sons of other very accomplished people.

Now that I reflect back on it, the change from spitting up to upchucking was a signal of these upwardly mobile social aspirations of my parents. By using the chic term-du-jour, they could not only try to show themselves acceptable among people that generally had more education and money than they, but they could send a message to us kids that it is the proper use of language that paves the path to our own success. Upchucking would then be the key or the signal of our aspirations.

Trying to Apply the Lesson

To my chagrin, however, I discovered that as I got older I felt the need to puke less often. Because I was a well-behaved and conservative lad, I didn't go drinking with friends, even a beer or two, and I didn't pursue activities that would have led to regular or even irregular vomiting. Some of my friends were wrestlers, and they did the regular "finger down the throat" a few days before a big match in order to "make weight," but since I was a shot-putter, I never had to lose weight in order to perform better.

So, off I went to college in 1970, to an elite school in the East (Brown University). I resisted the temptations of wild living but I did, on one occasion, indulge with my friend Greg in the consumption of a 24-inch submarine sandwich. We decided to get "all the fixings" on it, and so it contained quite a volcanic pond of ingredients. After eating about eight inches, Greg said he was "stuffed" and was starting to "feel sick." I, intrepid soul that I was, decided not only to eat my own 12 inches but to help Greg out by eating the rest of his. Well, the short of it was that I was up all night, throwing up or puking or upchucking. It was a terrible feeling, but I managed to get through the experience. When I next saw Greg, he greeted me and asked me if I had been sick after consuming the sub sandwich. Without missing a beat, I said that I had "upchucked all night."

With that one phrase, I felt that I had arrived at the highest social plateau I could possibly attain. And it was all thanks to the parental choice to change our vocabulary a decade earlier. Now I live confidently, able to move easily in any social circle in America, because I am a man who knows how to speak the language to get me into those circles. And upchuck got me there.

3702