Intro
The Gypsies Metamorphosed is a masque (a kind of court play involving music, fancy costumes, and dancing) by Ben Jonson, an English playwright who lived between 1572-1637. At one point in the masque, a character explains how an island called the Devil's Arse (yeah, that's Arse as in Ass) got its name. It all has to do with the devil letting out a massive fart one day after dinner.
We're not making this up.
Anyway, let's have a look.
Quote
Then from the Table he gave a start,
Where banquet and wine were nothing scarce,
All which he flirted away with a fart,
From whence it was called the Devil's Arse.
And then he made such a breech with the wind,
The hole too standing open the while,
That the scent of vapor, before and behind,
Hath foully perfumed most part of the Isle.
Analysis
So, um, the Devil spends his time farting all over the place after dinner and making the whole island stink. All right.
W. W. Greg looks at the first lines quoted above in his "The Rationale of Copy-Text." He notes that different editors have taken different approaches to these lines. "All which he flirted away with a fart," for example, is rendered by some editors as "All which he blew away with a fart."
Greg notes that, at first glance, "blew" makes more than sense than "flirted." Who the heck has heard of someone flirting away a fart? But in fact, he thinks that "blew" is wrong. The word that Jonson actually used was "flirted." As it turns out, one obscure definition of the word "flirt" is "to blow." So yeah, it turns out you can flirt your fart. Who knew?
Given that Jonson was a pretty brilliant playwright, it's very likely he used the more unconventional word "flirt" rather than the more conventional "blow" because it sounded better and had more of an effect.
Textual Critics have to be detectives. They have to hunt down words and definitions and usages and make sense of it all, just to get a little bit closer to what the author might actually have been meaning to say.