Note: It's true. The 16th-century French sappers came up with a great word for "bomb," twisting their own language with flatulent aplomb we've all missed since Richelieu founded the Académie Française in the 17th century. Granted, the word "petard" was only successfully inserted into English lexicon with the help of William Shakespeare, who nowadays has most of us thinking it was some sort of a polearm you could get wedgied with.

This would probably be a bad time to talk about "le Petomane," a french performer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who learned to "inhale" with his anus, and then "exhale" with an astoundingly wide range of amplitude, frequency, and modulation. Rumor has it that the already humor-challenged Académie Française was not amused.