> Yes! Finally, one of those questions I can answer (and only because we're in the First Aid unit in Health and this is fresh in my mind). Breathing into a bag DOES limit the amount of oxygen available, but when you're hyperventilating, breathing in amounts of CO2 (carbon dioxide? monoxide? Can't remember which) supposedly helps the hyperventilation, which is why you breath into the bag.
>
> > And shouldn't the potentially diminished O2 content in the bag actually increase, rather than alleviate, hiccoughs?
>
> No idea. I'm just repeating what I was so recently taught :-)
>


From the last comment, I'm not sure you are really interested, but CO2 is carbon(as in "C")-di(as in "2")-oxide(as in "ending with O"). You can now guess that carbon monooxide is 'plain' CO. "Mono" is a prefix (as is "pre" ...) with greek roots (according to m-w.com, it seems to work in latin too - I didn't check "pre") meaning "one" or "alone". For instance, a monorail is a railway with only one rail, which would make you think that an ordinary railway should be called a 'dirail'. Incidentaly (spelling?), monorails sometimes have the rail above the train, that is, the train hangs from the rail. I ought to provide some sort of link, but I would have to find that first, and I'm too lazy. If you split the word "prefix" up in its prefix and its root, you realize how well designed this word is: What better to call something that you stick (fix) before a word? I bet some of the wordsmiths out there could write some nice recursive ... poetry (?!?) about this word, even if it isn't that emotional.
Lately, this forum has had a lot of posts with multiple punctuation, and more significantly, a lot of posts against it. It just occured to me that you gain a unique form of expression by combining ? and ! in triples as above: ?!? expresses agitated questioning and !?! strong disbelief. There are other ways of doing this, but I'd have a hard time beating this for brevity.
What you cannot guess is that CO is even more poisonous than CO2 and comes from car exhausts - which is why people die from sitting in a approximately sealed garage together with a car running its engine. There is a difference in the quantity emitted by petrol/gasoline (is that only a language difference?) and diesel engines, but just now I cannot remember the relative magnitudes.

From the dictionary:
recursive. Adj. See recursive.

jul"experimenting with mushrooming threads"ian