I don’t know how you got that idea, EvanS. Language is what people use to communicate, and words are the pieces of language. If people say “shit” to communicate the substance which exits the nether end of the digestive tract, or the act of expelling such matter, then “shit” is a word and is part of the language.
“To defecate” is certainly one true verb to describe said function, but I would question the definite article, there. There are very few concepts for which there is only one single true English word. Other true verbs for that act include “to poop”, “to crap”, and “to dump” (though admittedly that last one has other, non-scatalogical meanings), as well as a bewildering array of idioms.
And why the comment about bathroom humor? So far as I can tell, nobody in this thread is treating the subject humorously.
If any conclusion can be drawn from the rhyming verb “spit”, my Cassell’s German-English Dictionary said that the standard tense forms of the word were
spit–spat–spat, or spit–spit*–spit*
*(Archaic or American).
Which seems to jibe with what I’ve always heard in America, where “shat” seems to be rare.
Is “shitted” ever correct? Perhaps in transitive formations? Such as, “The baby shitted his pants”; but not for intransitive ones like “The ferret shit under the porch.”? I can think of one other verb, “hang”, which is regular in the transitive construction referring to execution by hanging, but irregular in all other senses.
Guess I’m a lot older than you Chronos, and steeped in “proper English Usage” of my time, though I have personally overcome it, I would be lax not to fill TTM in on the historical perspective.
Often what IS, and what people believe there IS, are different (the French may be excepted in this, with their language college).
And why not the comment on bathroom humor? Perhaps you’re jaded… William Shatner? It’s boring to those of us who have grown up.
Regardless of how old you are, there’s never been an academy of English like there is an academy of French. There’s no group that dictates proper English usage or orthography and there never has been.
Language is defined by how words are actually used, regardless of what anyone dictates to be the proper usage. There was once a school of thought that said linguistic scholars should be prescriptive instead of descriptive, and dictionaries and grammar books once reflected that, but it was a mistaken notion that is now quite antiquated.
The historical perspective is that in prior times, usage was different and didn’t change as rapidly as it does now. It did change, of course, but not due to what people thousands of miles away had just started saying. There was a lot more local variation because of this: People travelled less, so regionalisms could persist longer and become more strange to outsiders. The German populations of Pennsylvania were able to speak German locally in some isolated regions of the state well up into the 1940s.
(If taken to a limit, those `regionalisms’ branch off into dialects and then languages. The dividing line between the three states (regional variation, local dialect, and language) is blurry and often political.)
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