Shit
From open-encyclopedia.com - the free encyclopedia.
Shit is a vernacular word in the Modern English denoting the solid byproduct of digestion. It is an old and native English word, but following the Norman Conquest, French and Latin terms for many common objects and bodily functions began to be seen as more distinguished than natively-derived words, and thenceforth, feces became the accepted English noun, to defecate became the accepted English verb, and shit was no longer flung about in polite company.
It is a noun, verb, and adjective (although rarely an adverb), and has great flexibility of usage and meaning.
| Contents |
Usage
The word shit is universally used by English speakers (Britons commonly use 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 occurrance of feces is generally shit or some shit, a single deposit of feces is sometimes a shit or a piece of shit -- although the accepted medical term, turd, is commonly used as a vulgarism -- 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, launching a poo submarine, dropping the kids off at the pool, brewing up a pot of s.h.i. tea) 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!) or fear (Oh, shit!), or surprise (Holy shit!). "Shit!" is often the last word of English speakers who die in sudden or violent circumstances.
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 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: I don't give a shit; I'm shit out of luck. It can denote a person of low integrity, or one who has behaved despicably: The phrase, 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.)
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.
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 when modifying the verb, to be, 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]), 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 never 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. 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
The word has existed in English for many centuries, for instance in its Old English form scite. Indeed, scholars can trace the word back through related Germanic languages (e.g., Old Norse 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 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) ).
The variant form shite (rhymes with "white") 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".
Occasionally, individuals enjoy making up pretend etymologies for shit as a joke. See Fake etymology.
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 shiitake carries a striking (and artificial) double-i, while 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. 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.)
Folk and/or 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, and is a crock of shit. See also: Fake etymology.
See also
de:Scheiße
