The word for today is…

garbage (noun):

1a : food waste
b : discarded or useless material
2a : trash
b : inaccurate or useless data

Source : Merriam -Webster

Etymology : Middle English, “poultry organs and body parts used for food, poultry refuse,” borrowed from Anglo-French. Garbage (implied in sergant garbagere – “kitchen servant tasked with plucking and cleaning poultry”) Garbage is of obscure origin but on morphological, semantic, or chronological grounds is unlikely to be related to Anglo-French garbeler, Middle English garbelen “to remove (impurities) from spices” or to Middle French gaburge, grabuge “quarrel, brawl.” The Anglo-French collocation ‘sergant garbagere’ indicates currency of the word as early as 1318 (Household Ordinances of Edward II).

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David is a retired surgeon originally from London who came to New Zealand twenty-seven years ago after being delayed in Singapore for thirteen years on leaving the UK. He was coerced into studying Latin...