Artist: @murrzstudio
At what point in the digestive process does the food become poop? When it can no longer be barfed up? When it enters the large intestine? When it gets mixed with bile in the small intestine?
Fecal matter is usually large intestine. It’s chyme in the small intestine. Some of the defining characteristics of fecal matter are things like the large amount of bacteria (up to 1/3 of its weight at exit), the color (yay bilirubin conversion), and the compaction (and simultaneously occurring dehydration). When we’re missing those things, we usually identify it as something other than feces. That means, nominally, that you don’t really have much poop until you’re well into the large intestine. Color is the weakest of those, but it is such a good indication of something going wrong if changed that I would say it is a part of anything that could be considered ‘true poop.’
So if you have bad diarrhea, that’s niether brown nor compact and I’m guessing is less bacteria by weight (because of its higher water content), would that still be chyme and not feces?
I mean, I’m not the absolute expert here, but we would likely identify it as something other than chyme. Diarrhoea (I like the british spelling because, as someone else put it, it looks like you’ve lost control of your vowels) isn’t chyme, nor really feces. There’s sort of a hierarchy of naming things, right, so what they are most is what we call them, so it would just be called diarrhoea.