Shit

Shit is a vernacular word in Modern English denoting feces, the 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. Euphemisms for shit (many originating in baby talk) include poop, caca, doo-doo, dookie, poopie, poo-poo, dump, deuce, load, crap, pinching a loaf, dropping the kids off at the pool, etc.

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. The word may be further traced to Proto-Germanic *skit-, and ultimately to Proto-Indo-European *skheid-, "split, divide, separate." Conceptually, it refers to that part of the body (the excrement), which is "divided" from the rest of the body. It is related to the verb "to shed" (as in, "to shed one's skin"), "schism", and other words in common English usage. In Ireland the phrase "I'm shitting myself laughing" retains the older pronounciation "I'm skitting myself" but this may be due to more recent euphemisation.

"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 ["poo, to poo"], Irish cac ["dung"], and Greek κακός ["bad"]). This may indeed be the origin of the term "poppycock" (used as a softer form of "bullshit"), through Dutch.

The variant form shite is found in many regional and social dialects, especially in Scotland, Ireland and Northern England where it is generally used as an adjective, 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. (In the American English context its offensive potential may be somewhat mitigated, as are arse, bloody, and some other British forms of profanity.)

Spoken and written substitutes for the word shit in American English include sugar, "shizer", sheesh, shoot, shizzle, 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. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, "bollocks" is often used as a coarse but nowhere near as offensive substitute.

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.)

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.

Usage

The word shit is used by English speakers, 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). Most people get a good sense of satisfaction from using the word "shit" and it is just a good way to relieve stress: "Oh shit!"

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, lighting a bum cigar, cutting a log, dropping a deuce, making sausages, making butterfinger bb's) 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. Another answer to the same question is, I'd never shit you, you're my favorite turd, to which the funniest response is usually, And I'd never leave you, you're my favorite asshole.

Shit can also be used as a comparative noun; for instance, This show is funny as shit!, or This test is hard as shit, or That was stupid as shit. For the third example here, stupid can be replaced with a synonym such as dumb or idiotic, although idiotic is uncommonly used and would sound out of place in this phrase. These three usages (with funny, hard, and stupid or another synonym of stupid) are heard most commonly in the United States. Note that shit is both a positive and negative thing in these examples, shit being apparently very funny (a positive thing) and in the second and third examples very hard (as in, difficult- a negative thing to be) or very stupid. Note also that in a phrase like this, the speaker doesn't include the term as before the comparison- saying that something is as funny as shit would sound like a criticism to anyone reading the term (shit not being a very funny thing to be), although if spoken could be understood along with the spirit it's said in. Using the as changes these phrases from a simple colloquialism to a literal statement.

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. It's common for someone to refer to an unpleasant thing as hard shit (You got a speeding ticket? Man, that's some hard shit), but the phrase tough shit is used as an unsympathetic way of saying too bad to whomever is having problems (You got arrested? Tough shit, man!) or as a way of expressing to someone that they need to stop complaining about a negative thing that occurred to them and just deal with it (Billy: I got arrested because of you! Tommy: Tough shit, dude, you knew you might get arrested when you chose to come with me.) Note that in this case, as in many cases with the term, tough shit is often said as a way of pointing out someone's fault in his/her own current problem. 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. In the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, "shitten" is used as the past participle.

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 as an interjection. Euphemisms for shit in this usage include shoot, shucks, and in Hiberno-English sugar and its Irish equivalent siúcra (pronounced /ʃuːkrə/.

Shit itself can be a quasi-euphemism, many illicit drugs (notably hashish) being referred to as shit. To be shitfaced is to be extremely drunk.

Non-native English speakers should take note that shit and fuck often serve different uses as expletives, such that (for instance) the gerund, 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. It is not uncommon, however, to encounter an adjective constructed partially of the word shit, such as "Shittastic" or "Shittacular".

Sometimes in family movies, some actors let the word s**t slip, but then stretch it into a harmless word. An example of this occurring are in Spy Kids, where Carmen is heard to say, "Oh, shi...itake mushrooms." The euphemism was also written into Spy Kids 2, where Carmen says, "You are full of shiitake mushrooms." (The crowd was offended anyway.)

Acceptance

Recently the word shit has become increasingly acceptable on American television and radio (in Britain this has been the case for some time, although fuck and cunt remain mainly taboo). Many songs with the word shit in them are now slipping past censors on the radio.

A good example is the episode of South Park "It Hits The Fan" in which the citizens of South Park use the word shit 162 times, as counted by a counter at the bottom left corner of the screen. This episode is currently airing as early as primetime left fully intact.

The hit drama on the FX network, Nip/Tuck as well as FX's other late-night dramas, The Shield and Rescue Me, are frequently using the word without censoring.

More examples

Insults

You shitface! (insult)
Shitbag (another insult)
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.)
Shiteater (you are unpleasant) exception: A shiteating grin implies that the wearer is very happy
Eat shit (insults)
Eat shit and die! (more potent than "eat shit")
You piece of shit. (insult)
Shitfucker. (insult)
I'm going to spread my shit on your face. (this is used for insulting in-laws)

Pure emotions (ejaculations)

Eat shit! (anger towards someone)
Oh shit! (surprise or form of exclamation)
Hot shit! (Absolutely amazing)
Holy shit! (wow)
Shit happens (is used when the work isnt going right)
Tough shit! (Too bad.)
Bloody shit! (Bloody is commonly used to accentuate a swear word. However, native English speakers hailing from North America may be unfamiliar with Bloody)
Shit! Shitting shit it! (an expression of pure frustration) (quoted from the character of Daisy stiener from spaced)

Slang

Are you shitting me? (Are you kidding me/Are you for real?)
I shit you not!
My computer shit the bed! (My computer broke/malfunctioned/crashed.)
Who shit in his Wheaties? (Why is he so upset or angry?)
Who gives a shit? (Who cares?)
That is hot shit. (That person/car/uniform/room/suit is very well kept.) Also, you are hot shit. "Thank you."
When the shit hits the fan. (That point at which a given situation has reached a climax.) Usually when the situation is headed for a bad outcome.
Damn, this place is a shithouse (or shithole)! (A boring and/or bad place.)
one's shit (one's things, personal belongings; Where's all my shit?)
to shit a brick (to be very angry or shocked; e.g. "Bob is going to shit a brick when he finds out you broke the lawnmower.")
Full of shit (accusation of someone who has lied) (statement: "He/She is full of shit")
It's a shit sandwich and we're all going to have to take a bite. (observation of an impending disaster)
I've got the shits. (Refers to diarrhea.)
Shit out of luck.

Threat

Don't give me that shit! (You're lying.)
I'm going to beat the shit out of you! (I'm gonna beat you up.)
I'll rip your head off and shit down your neck! (Quote from R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket)
I'll make you shit in your pants! (Scare you badly.)
You piece of shit