Shit: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 03:52, 31 October 2006

Revision as of 22:19, 31 October 2006

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The word ''shit'' (or sometimes ''shite'' [to rhyme with bite] in Scotland, Ireland, Northern England and Lincolnshire), is used by English speakers, but it 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. 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'', ''swinging an opossum'', ''burying the ostrich'', ''squeezing off a round'', ''dropping the kids off at the pool'', ''brewing up a pot of s.h.i. tea'', ''laying a fresh man-biscuit'', ''jettison a spent carbon-fuel rod'', ''making a sacrifice to the toilet gods'', ''building a house for President Lincoln'', ''releasing the prisoners'', ''lighting a bum [[cigar]]'', ''cutting a log'', ''dropping a [[deuce]]'', ''making sausages'', ''making butterfinger bb's'', ''punching a grumper'', ''busting a grumpy'', ''releasing the demons'', ''dropping a charge (or depth charge)'', ''greeting the night'', ''splitting the corn'', ''taking a ride down the sunshine highway'', ''seeing a man about a horse (or wallaby)'', ''planting a brown carrot'', ''giving birth to a food baby'', ''dropping a dagger'', ''paying tribute to Dutch porn'', ''taking the Browns to the SuperbowlSuper Bowl'', ''bending a biscuit'', ''negotiating the release of the chocolate hostages'', ''witnessing the Brown ghost of Raynham Hall'') or with a vague and fairly rigid literalism. In the United States Army, the euphemism 'executing a class-one download' has become popular. Other substitutes for the word ''shit'' in American English include ''sugar'' and ''shoot''.

''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!'').