zatch

English

Etymology

Coined by James Thurber in the 13 Clocks (1950)

Noun

zatch (plural zatches)

1. The stomach.
   • 1950, James Thurber, The 13 Clocks:

     I wonder if he would order me to cause a fall of purple snow . . .or make a table out of sawdust . . . or merely slit me from my guggle to my zatch and say to Saralinda "There he lies, your latest fool, a nameless minstrel. […] "

   • 1993, Bevan Amberhill, The Bloody Man, page 18:

     Worse. I shall have to rip him from his guggle to his zatch.

   • 2000, William Kelley, The Tyree Legend, page 117:

     Here came this goddamned circumbendibus wrench of a gust that ripped his royals, burst his boom, raped his lock, ruptured his rudder, bent his beam, blew his nose, stripped his poses, muzzled his mizzen, broached his bilge, guggled his zatch, stemmed his stern, ticked his tack, and drove him and his goddamned junky praam of a punt straight down by the heelpost into sixty fathoms and nineteen and a half feet of bass-shit and cockleshells!

   • 2011, Anne Lamott, Crooked Little Heart, page 32:

     He gave some blood to the lab, and five days later was in surgery, “slit,” as he put it, “from gizzard to zatch”

Usage notes

Usually used in a variant of the phrase "from guggle to zatch"