A few years ago I read an otherwise forgettable novel in which the
author mentioned “The 33 substances that come out of the human body”.
After many hours of cogitation and list-making, I could only come up
with 24. Perhaps I’m more stringent than the above-mentioned author.
On the one hand, I feel that changing a name does not alter the
substance - snot, phlegm, and mucous are, in fact, all the same
thing. And on the other hand, I think listing items like slivers,
bullets, and toejam is just cheating.
Here is my list: 1) hair, 2) skin, 3) perspiration, 4) sebum, 5) earwax, 6) tears, 7) mucous, 8) blood, 9) vomit, 10) carbon dioxide, 11) teeth, 12) saliva, 13) breast milk, 14) fingernails, 15) urine, 16) feces, 17) methane gas, 18) menses, 19) smegma, 20) infant human beings, 21) placenta, 22) amniotic fluid, 23) pus, 24) that gold, transparent fluid that dries out to become a scab.
Eyelashes are hair. And I think those hard things (known in my youth as “sleepers”) may well be mucous hardened into little bitty eye boogers. But I’m not sure.
Perhaps I could make the case for all the fun things that come out of the womb during birth? Let’s see, there’s the amniotic fluid, the placenta/umbilical cord, and the amniotic sac itself. That’s four right there.
If you wanted to be a splitter you could divide a lot of these substances into many different components – blood, for instance, is plasma and all the blood cells. Semen is a lot of different liquids mixed together with the sperm, etc. But I suppose that’s cheating, and it could get kinda silly…
If you are going to differentiate between all the gases (carbon dioxide & methane), you might as well include hydrogen sulfide, which (among others) puts the aroma in farts.
