Once upon a time, there were a little girl named Gaby and a big boy named Barack. Gaby was in the eighth grade while Barack was being inaugurated president. It was an inconvenient time for either to get hiccups.

Unfortunately, it was Gaby who got them. She was watching the inauguration on TV at school. She hicked, and then she giggled, and the giggle made her hic. As she spiraled into constitutional disrespect, Mr. Marsico dispatched her to the principal’s office. Hicking and giggling down the hall, she was a little scared but also relieved to get out of class. In such times, hiccups are good.

Gaby got off easy. Not only was she not given detention or charged with something akin to sedition, but her hiccups went away in a matter of minutes. Doctors never discovered the cause of her affliction. In fact, they didn’t even try.

But the causes could have been any of many, including a hair touching the eardrum, a cyst on the neck, a tumor in the brain, a tumor somewhere else, devious elves, gastrointestinal reflux, laryngitis, encephalitis, meningitis, pneumonia, multiple sclerosis, stroke, traumatic brain injury, alcoholism, anesthesia, barbiturates, diabetes, electrolyte imbalance, kidney disease, chemotherapy, spicy food, carbonated beverage, steroids, opioids, malfunctioning pacemaker, or weighing a hog.

Actually, there’s been only one confirmed case of someone coming down with hiccups while weighing a hog. This was in 1922, when it was delightfully normal for a man to be lifting up 350 pounds of unprocessed pork.

But something went wrong. The man, Charles Osborne, fell, pig in hand, banging his head on the way down and breaking a tiny blood vessel in his brain. He didn’t feel a thing, but the hog was executed, hung on a hook, cut into pieces and eaten by scores of American consumers.

Osborne wasn’t so lucky. As soon as he hit his head, he began to hiccup 40 times per minute. This went on for years. His wife divorced him, but he married a second, who didn’t seem to mind. They had eight children.

Over the years, he managed to slow his hics to 20 per minute, but it was still hard to eat. He had to blend his food into a liquid to be able to swallow during brief opportunities.

It is estimated that Osborne hiccuped 438 million times in 68 years. Then one day he simply stopped. A year later, he died. He was 97.

Jennifer Mee, known to American consumers as the “Hiccup Girl,” was about Gaby’s age in 2007, when she came down with a case of synchronous diaphragmatic flutter so bad she hicked 50 times a minute for 35 days, long enough for her to appear on various TV shows and become a national celebrity.

Later that year, after the hiccups stopped, she ran away from home. Three years later she was arrested for involvement in a vicious robbery in which a victim was shot four times with a .38. Jennifer pleaded sort-of innocent. Her lawyer sort-of blamed Tourette’s syndrome for the hiccups and the murder. A jury found her plenty guilty of the latter and sentenced her to life in prison without parole.

It wasn’t her fault. She’d tried breathing into a paper bag, standing on her head, bending way over and drinking water, eating a big wad of peanut butter, and putting sugar under her tongue. Also, she didn’t actually pull the trigger.

Other cures: Salt in yogurt. Cardamom tea. Chew ginger. Hold your breath. Hold a pencil in your teeth and drink a glass of ice water. Try again with warm water. Get scared. Sing loudly. Laugh loudly. Breathe carefully, thoughtfully.

Check your genetics. Hiccups go way back. Amphibians were the first hiccupers. It was a way to pull oxygen through their gills. In time, they grew lungs, kind of like the way gilled tadpoles turn into pulmonary frogs.

One thing led to another, and now all mammals hiccup. Dogs. Bears. Bats. Whales. A fetus hiccups in the womb, even without air to hic. It’s an underwater myoclonic jerk of the diaphragm, a trial run at actual breathing. It could be said that one’s first breath is a hiccup.

But back to Gaby: It would be fortunate indeed if we had a president inaugurated while he or she had the hiccups. Imagine it… “I do solemnly (hic) swear that I will faithfully (hic) execute…” And then he or she giggles, and then hics again. That’s what we need. In such times, hiccups are good.

Glenn Alan Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.