Shit

Shit is a vernacular word in Modern English denoting the feces, the solid byproduct of digestion. It is an old and native English word, but following the Norman Conquest, Norman, Anglo-Norman, French, and Latin terms for many common objects and bodily functions began to be seen as more distinguished than native words, and thereafter feces became the accepted English noun, to defecate became the accepted English verb, and shit was no longer used in polite company.

The scientific study of shit is termed scatology or coprology. Much environmental and ecological information can be obtained from the study of these samples. Shit that has undergone fossilization is called a coprolite. Coprophagy is the eating of shit which is a normal part of the diet for many animals.

Shit is a noun, verb, adjective, and adverb, and has great flexibility of usage and meaning. A more polite way to say shit is to use the word poop.

Usage

The word shit is used by English speakers (those in Britain and Ireland sometimes choose the variant, shite), but it is considered vulgar, and thus is usually avoided in formal speech. A less vulgar substitute is crap, which while still impolite and/or emphatic, is not considered obscene. The correct vernacular usage of crap is mostly identical, with certain key exceptions (see below).

In the word's literal sense, it has a rather small range of common usages. In American English, an unspecified or collective occurrence of feces is generally shit or some shit, a single deposit of feces is sometimes a shit or a piece of shit, and to defecate is to shit, or counterintuitively to take a shit. While it is common to speak of shit as existing in a pile, a load, a hunk and other quantities and configurations, such expressions flourish most strongly in the figurative. For practical purposes, when actual defecation and excreta are spoken of in English, it is either through creative euphemism (pinching a loaf, laying some cable, seeing Mr. Brown off to the coast, dropping the kids off at the pool, brewing up a pot of s.h.i. tea, releasing the prisoners, Cutting a Log) or with a vague and fairly rigid literalism.

Most expressly, in English, shit carries an encompassing variety of figurative meanings. Of these, perhaps the most common are generic expressions of displeasure (as in, Shit!), fear (Oh, shit!), or surprise (Holy shit!).

Shit denotes trouble, as in, I was in a lot of shit; low quality, as in, That disk drive is shit; unpleasantness, as in, Those pants look like shit, or This casserole tastes like shit; or falsehood or insincerity, as in, Don't give me that shit, or You're full of shit. The word bullshit also denotes false or insincere discourse. (Horseshit is roughly equivalent, while Chickenshit means cowardly). Are you shitting me!? is a question sometimes given in response to an incredible assertion. An answer that reasserts the veracity of the claim is, I shit you not.

Shit can comfortably stand in for the terms bad and nothing in many instances (Dinner was good, but the movie was shit. You're all mad at me, but I didn't do shit!). Many usages are idiomatic. The phrase, I don't give a shit denotes indifference. I'm shit out of luck usually refers to someone who is at the end of their wits or who has no remaining viable options. That little shit shot me in the ass, suggests an individual of small rectitude.

However, in such a nominative construction, crap (as in, That little crap shot me in the ass) is not accepted vernacular English. A more likely phrasing would be, that little crap-head, or that little turd. Of further note is that little shit is common as a term of opprobrium, while big shit is unfamiliar, and that direct scatological appellations are rarely applied to females, for whom gender-specific terms such as bitch or cunt more readily accrue. (However, in Britain, the term cunt is used to refer to men very much more frequently than to women, so it is not really a gender-specific term.)

In Get your shit together! the term may refer to some set of personal belongings or tools, or to one's wits, composure, or attention to the task at hand. He doesn't have his shit together suggests he is failing rather broadly, with the onus laid to multiple personal shortcomings, rather than bad luck or outside forces. Shit can even be a plain, neuter pronoun for basically anything in vulgar speech. EG, in There is some serious shit going down shit can easily be replaced by stuff with no real loss of meaning (the same goes for Get your shit together! and the like).

While the most common uses of shit are figurative, the unpleasant substance to which the term literally refers is seldom entirely absent, and thus most uses of shit have some degree of pejoration. But this is far from a universal rule: In some styles of discourse, shit can replace nearly any noun. In the sentence, "I bought a bunch of shit at the store today", shit is merely a casual intensification of the term, stuff. Similarly, Check that shit out! connotes surprise at some sort of stuff or activity that could very well be pleasant. Give me a bite of that shit implies a deliciousness notably absent from the literal substance. To drug users, shit almost always refers to a drug being discussed. This was a secret code in the early 60s, and though most people now understand that in phrases like "I bought some good shit today, I can't wait to try it", the usage of the phrase is still common.

Perhaps the only constant connotation that shit reliably carries is that the referent to which it applies holds some degree of emotional intensity for the speaker. Whether offense is taken at hearing the word varies greatly according to listener and situation, and is related to age and social class: elderly speakers and those of (or attaining to) higher socioeconomic strata tend to use it more privately and selectively than younger and more blue-collar speakers. Regardless, it is highly improbable that any native English speaker of any age or social position can truthfully claim never to have used the word. Moreover, in some colloquial speech, calling something or someone the shit is laudatory. For instance, Dave's new car is the shit, suggests that Dave's new car is very good, or very cool. This meaning is also essentially a substitution for the term stuff, but is also similar to the vernacular usage of bad to mean dangerous and deserving of respect. Crap is unknown in such locutions.

As an adjective, to be shitty always denotes low quality: This is a shitty train. It can mean to feel ill or guilty: John felt shitty today, or, referring to an action, it can mean to be contemptible or immoral: That was a shitty thing to do to her. The noun form is often interchangeable with the adjectival, especially when referring to objects and intangibles. Ex.: This is a shit train, or The weather was shit today.

The verb, to shit, is most commonly used to refer to the literal act of defecation, but it can also mean to treat badly or to humiliate (I got shit on for being late, He shit all over my project), or to produce something carelessly (I was hoping for a project we could all be proud of, but Dave just goes and shits something out at the last minute). The past participle of to shit is attested as shat, shit, or shitted, depending on dialect and sometimes the rhythm of the sentence. In American English shit as a past participle is always correct, while shat is generally acceptable and shitted is uncommon.

Shit (like fuck) is often used more to add emphasis than meaning: Shit! I was so shit-scared of that shithead that I shit-talked him into dropping out of the karate match. The term, to shit-talk, connotes bragging or exaggeration (whereas to talk shit primarily means to gossip [about someone in a damaging way] or to talk in a boastful way about things which are erroneous in nature), but in such constructions as the above, the word shit often functions not unlike a form of punctuation, filling all likely grammatical slots.

Non-native English speakers should take note that shit and fuck often serve different uses as expletives, such that (for instance) the gerunitive, shitting, is rarely used emphatically. Ex.: In the sentence, I was so shit-scared of that shithead that I shit-talked him into dropping out of the shitting karate match, the phrase, shitting karate match, would be incomprehensible to native speakers except in suggesting a singularly unsanitary form of karate. (In the UK, phrases such as shitting hell as an emphatic are not unknown.) A correct and clear vulgarism would be, the fucking karate match. Similarly, shit is never used as an infix: While in-fucking-credible is comprehensible English, in-shitting-credible is not. Shit you! is likewise a puzzling and ineffective expression of defiance.

Etymology

Scholars trace the word back to Old Norse origin (skīta), and it is virtually certain that it was used in some form by preliterate Germanic tribes at the time of the Roman Empire. It was originally adopted into Old English as scitte, eventually morphing into Middle English schītte. Shit has cognates in many other Indo-European languages, including Greek, where the cognate root skor, skato- has been borrowed into English and forms the basis of scatology and a host of related technical terms. The most likely common word for shit in Proto-Indo-European would however probably be *kakka, (Cf. Latin Caca, Anglo-Saxon Cac, German Kacke, Kacken(Pooh, to pooh), OIr Cac(Dung), Greek Kakos(Bad) ). This may indeed be the origin of the term "poppycock" (used as a softer form of "bullshit"), through Dutch.

The variant form shite (rhymes with "kite") is found in many regional and social dialects, especially in Scotland and Ireland, and is sometimes used in other parts of the world as a less-offensive (at least in intent) form of the word "shit". Shite can also be used by people in North America to sound funny, as it is not usually used.

Spoken and written substitutes for the word shit in American English include sugar, sheesh, shoot, and shucks, as in the constructions, Oh, sugar! Sheesh, that was a close one, Aw, shoot!, and Aw, shucks! These are colloquialisms that are rather complex in usage, with sugar accruing mostly to female speakers in the American South and many rural contexts, shoot being near-universal, shucks enjoying occasional vogue in many contexts, and sheesh being predominantly urban, as well as doing double duty by crossing over with the term, sheez, which is in a continuum with jeez, a euphemism for Jesus. All of these terms are considered polite, mildly comical, and archaic, although none is an archaism, and all remain in general use. Countless words beginning with the phoneme, sh-, have seen duty as quick and improvised substitutes for shit by polite Americans, on occasions in which thumbs have been banged by hammers and stepladders have slipped their purchases.

Several foreign loan words in English are carefully spelled so as to avoid the sequential grouping of the letters, s, h, i, and t. The word shih-tzu offered a mediating h and hyphen long before such care was common in Romanizing phonetic Chinese. Shi'ite sometimes carries an apostrophe to further insulate it from homonymy. (However, this is also an alternative colloquial pronunciation of "shit"!) The German-Jewish surname Lipshitz has been subject to many reconfigurations and legal changes, although holdouts yet stand firm. (The surname Shitz, however, appears to be abandoned, as any individual who held it would find their first name unwillingly and irrevocably engaged in a grammatical but unflattering sentence. Ok)

Folk and/or Fake etymology

Occasionally, individuals enjoy making up pretend etymologies for shit as a joke, see Fake etymology.

Falsehoods are often propagated via schoolyards, barrooms, and the Internet regarding the etymology of the word. A recent example is a fanciful story about manure being shipped across the sea, leading in some way to the acronym, "Ship High In Transit". [1] This "history" traces to an April 1999 post on the Usenet newsgroup, rec.humor.

More examples

Profanity synonyms

• Shit box (toilet)
• Shitter (anus or toilet)
• Shit paper (toilet paper)
• Shcrap (starting to say shit, but finishing with crap)

Insults

• You shitface! / Shiteater (insults)
• Don't shit on my day! (showing annoyance)
• You little shit! (directed at small, annoying child)
• You don't know jack shit! (You don't know anything!)
• He thinks he's hot shit. (He thinks he's great.)
• I eat pieces of shit like you for breakfast. (I am better than you!)
• shiteater (you are unpleasent)

Emphasis

• I don't give a shit! (I don't care!)
• The shit hit the fan! (bad stuff going on)
• I bought a shitload [or shit-ton] of them! (to exaggerate an amount or degree)

Pure emotions (ejaculations)

• Eat shit! (anger towards someone)
• Oh shittings! (surprise or form of exclamation)
• Shit hot!! (Absoloutly amazing)
• What the shit?? (Synonym for "What the fuck?")
• Holy shit! (wow)
• Ah shit! (Said when made a mistake)
• Tough shit! (Too bad.)

Slang

• This potato salad is shit! (This potato salad is bad.)
• This potato salad is the shit! (This potato salad is good.)

Notice that when the word, "the" is place in front of the word shit; it becomes positive; however without "the" shit is generally a negative word.

See also

• Shinola
• Profanity
• Seven dirty words