Well… I’m just curious. What is the origin of the word ‘shit’? I heard it stood for ‘Ship High In Transit’ (this was stamped on the bundles of packed manue) when manure used to be transported on ships. The story is that they used to store it deep in the ship but methane gas would build up and eventually blow up the ship. Is this true?
No, it’s not true. Shit is a very old word, related to the modern German word “scheisse” (which means the same thing) and to the Middle English (and modern English) “shite” and the Old English “scite”. They all mean the same thing.
Etymologies of old words such as “shit”, “fuck” and so forth which are said to be acronyms are nearly all spurious. All acronyms are modern.
Besides, why would anyone transport manure by ship? Wouldn’t it be much easier to use locally produced manure, and to transport animals to produce it if necessary?
Well, glad you asked.
UDS has got the basics down, and I’ll contribute what the OED has got to say on this scatological matter.
First, the OED says that shit is “Not now in decent use.” Meaning that it was, at one time, a fairly innocuous word. It’s various forms are: scitte, schit, schyt, schit, s©heitt(e), shit and shite. It appears to come from the Old English “scite,” meaning “dung.”
Now, the fun part about the OED, especially with my adolescent habit of looking up naughty words and giggling to myself at their historical uses. It’s so much fun trying to figure out what the rest of the context was. For instance, under “fellatio” we have this little historical ditty: “This fellatrix had borne herself the name of Labda.” What a grand almost mythical sentence. But what the hell was the context of this all?
I’m digressing.
Back to shit. The first recorded use (as an intransitive verb, it seems) is dated circa 1308 “in Rel. Ant. II. 176 Hail be ghe, skinners, with ghure drench kive,…Whan that his thonnerith, ghe mote ther in schite.” Or how 'bout this piece of advice, circa 1400 from “Lanfranc’s Cirurg. 12 If he may not schite oones a day, helpe him therto…with clisterie.” Would be great advice, if somebody could tell me what “clisterie” could possibly be.
Here’s a lovely entry from 1387, “Trevisa Higden (Rolls) IV. 329 They wolde…make hem a pitte…whan they wolde schite…; and whanne they hadda i-scete they wolde fille the pitte aghen.” Very hygenic, I must say.
You may also be interested to note that shit has several past tenses recorded: schoot, schote, shyt, shote, shit, shat, and shitted. Plus past participles: sciten, i-schete, schetun, schitten, shat and shit. I’m quite fond of “i-schete.” Today, I schote once. Yesterday I had i-schete twice. The things you learn from the OED.
As a noun, its first use appears in 1585, in Polwart’s “Flyting w. Mongomerie.” The OED excerpt: “Fond flytter, shit shytter.” I can’t even begin to guess what words trailed or followed that poetic fragment. Another exerpt from this work appears in the OED, under the secondary definition “a contemptuous epithet applied to a person.” Polwart wrote “Wanshapen shit.” If only modern epithets could be so elegant.
As an exclamation, “shit” is first recorded in 1920 by Joyce in his Letters. “O shite and onions! When is this bloody state of affairs going to end?” Or in 1922, with e.e. cummings “Enormous room.” “My father is dead! Shit! Oh well. The war is over. Good.”
Oh, how I can lost in the OED…
It’s the administration of an enema (“clyster”).
Bet you’re sorry you asked.
Shoulda figured. Back then, it seems, there was no problem a good, brisk hose up the arse couldn’t alleviate. And people speak “of the good old days.” Humbug.
Also, you do realise, now, that I will never be able to look at my darling WTA Belgian sweetie Kim Clijsters the same way again. Thanks.
WTF? “Arse” “realise”? Dammit, where did those British spellings come from? I’m a Chicagoan. I think I could use an enema.
I’ve always felt that “shit” was an example of onomatopeia, a word inspired by the sound of the source. I suspect the latin “cacere” and our baby word “kaka” come from the same thing (I know they don’t all sound alike – excreting solid wastes provides an entire symphony of sounds). Ditto with “piss”.
How come “onomatopeia” doesn’t sound like anything?
Oh, Webster’s to the rescue:
(assumed) Middle English, from Old English scite; akin to Old English -sc*tan to defecate
Date:circa 1585
Psst…handy…I’ve even got the quote from the 1585 source if you look up a couple posts. Plus, that’s the first instance of it recorded as a noun. As a verb it dates back to 1308 in written records at least.
There’s at least one earlier recorded use, if compound words count. The poem “The Owl and the Nightingale,” which was probably written between 1189 and 1216, contains one of my favorite Middle English words – schit-worde. (Most scholarly editors gloss this, rather coyly, as “foolish talk”; I think it is a word that very much needs to be resurrected.)
Ooo…nice one, Fretful. I just looked through the OED again, faced with the reality that I must’ve missed that one, since “The Owl and the Nightingale” isn’t exactly that obscure and, sure enough:
So I read up on “shit” a little more. And guess what exciting news I’ve found? I bet you’re wetting your pants in anticipation. An even earlier reference. In fact, two previous references, under the definition “Diarrhoea, esp. in cattle. Obs.”
Somebody with any knowledge of Latin help me out, but is that saying something like “when the Angles say ‘Scitta’”? Otherwise, why the Latin reference in OED?
And I still like this 17th-century equivalent of “fuck all y’all”:
Or how 'bout “A scurvy shit-breech Lad.” C’mon, say it in your best pirate voice “Arrrr…ye scurvy shit-breech lad!”
Am I insane to get an inordinate amount of joy from this etymological fodder?
It means “. . . which is called “scitta” in English . . .” or “. . . which is called “Scitta” in the English fashion . . .”
pulykamell, if Von would come back we could ask if they want the origin of the noun or verb…
Thanks UDS! Hence the Latin reference, gotcha.
handy - We could, but I think we’ve covered all the bases.
“Force shites on reason’s back.”
-Benjamin Franklin
Poor Richard’s Almanack
1733
pulykamell, are you using the second edition of the OED?
If we’re collecting early uses, here’s an adjectival use from the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (we don’t have an exact date for the Tales – sometime in the 1380s or 90s, but before 1400):
And shame it is, if a preest take keep,
A shiten shepherd and a clene sheep.
As with Fretful Porpentine’s example, it usually gets glossed as something like “defiled” (in the Riverside) or “befouled” (in the Norton Anthology), but as the lines occur in the midst of a statement on what the ideal priest should be (during which the narrator briefly assumes the voice of the Parson, who’s just such an ideal priest) I think the example probably points to the acceptability of the word at the time. (Though Chaucer certainly wasn’t averse to vulgarity in the proper context!)
You know, I wasn’t going to post in this thread, but no one else, not even my estimable colleague Pulykamell, has yet traced the word back to its earliest roots in Proto-Indo-European and shown how it’s related to other familiar words. Argh, it’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it…
From PIE *skei- ‘to cut, split’. Hence, to separate. The concept is of the droppings being separated from the body.
Also produced Latin scire, ‘to know’. What does this have to do with splitting and separating? To cognitively separate one thing from another is to know where one thing begins and the other leaves off, to discern the differences between things. This is the Latin concept of knowledge: essentially analytical. From this we get scientia ‘knowledge’. Who’d have thought that science and shit are cousins? But they are.*
Also, Greek [symbol]scizein[/symbol] ‘to split’: gave us schedule, schism, schist, and of course, good old “schizo”. So the next time you see a schizoid scientist taking a shit, that’s a real Indo-European moment.
Paul Theroux used these cognates for wordplay in his health-food novel Millroy the Magician. While Millroy taught people about healthy eating, he kept repeating the Latin phrase fidem scit, ‘he knows faith’. It was also his sneaky way of saying "feed 'em s**."
Hey, Jomo, I leave all the hard-core linguistic stuff to you. I just try to do the English stuff. 
Like I said, I derive a strange pleasure from reading the origin of English words in the OED. Fascinating to see “science” and “shit” related… Where do you dig up this stuff?
Handy - Should be 2nd edition OED. I just go over to the Bloomberg terminal at my (former) office and look it up there. I assume they’re using the 2nd edition.