The first example that came to mind was for people who do illegal activity.
Drug dealers, don’t sell drugs where you live.
Car thieves, don’t steal cars in your neighborhood.
And so on.
I’ve always understood it to mean you should avoid romance and/or sex with coworkers because it can get messy.
But I’ve never been able to reconcile it in my mind as advice that would be useful to offer someone. If your coworker Harvey tells you he’s banging Linda in HR, you might tell him he shouldn’t shit where he eats (or maybe a more polite version). Then, I think, his most likely reply would be one of these:
- “Mind your own business” or some variation. Of course, Harvey was the one who brought it up in the first place, but he was probably assuming the only “right answer” would be “way to go, man!”
- “Oh, we know what we’re doing. No one’s going to let this get messy.”
- “You know, you’re right. I’ll hie myself down to her office forthwith and break it off.”
Of those, #3 is by far the least likely.
Is that really true though? I think drug dealers mostly sell where they live. Stealing a car in your neighborhood and keeping it at your house may be a dumb idea but don’t stolen cars get sold or at least abandoned after a joyride? Would those thieves care whether the care came from their neighborhood?
I think the ‘where you eat’ part makes the most sense as your source of income. The ‘shit’ could be anything that puts diminishes it or puts it at risk.
It’s a pretty rude way to offer advice. I think it’s used more often as sardonic commentary (and often gossip about a third party) after things have all gone horribly wrong.
Oh, yeah, which is why I included (“or a more polite version”). But even so, I doubt that very many people would be be receptive to the idea.
Sometimes my horse passes manure on her hay pile, so for her the expression is literal. I interpret the phrase to be don’t do stupid things at a place that benefits you.
And I guess it would be a similar mistake if she peedin her water trough.
I agree with this. The point of the idiom, in my opinion, is that you’re not being told to avoid shitting or avoid eating. Both are things you should be doing. You just need to keep them separated.
The same is true about your dating life and your work life. The metaphor isn’t telling people not to date or not to work. It’s just saying to keep them separated.
It’s just a saying. I never said it was applied diligently across the affected cohort.
There’s another saying that fits here: Thou shalt not steal.
But people still do it.
It’s more of a general philosophy. The actual application of it is up to the individual.
From the Big Bang Theory, supporting the don’t have romantic relationships in the workplace interpretation.
It’s an idiomatic expression which is a phrase that has meaning other than what the words literally convey. I think Wictionary sums it up well with their definition: “One should not cause trouble in a place, group, or situation in which one regularly finds oneself, as it will likely backfire.” I doubt it was ever meant in a literal sense because most animals have the good sense not to shit where they’re eating.
Huh, I have only heard “drinking your own champagne”. As in: An internet company that makes communication software introduced a bug, and it took longer to fix than it should have, because “we drank too much of our own champagne” and their internal messaging was down, too. (Real example from a friend who works there.)
And then there’s “eating your seed corn.” Occasionally used literally, for/by people on the brink of starvation; but also metaphorically, to mean in general “don’t use up something you’re going to need to have for later production.”
(Much of modern agriculture uses purchased seed which has often been treated with something that would make eating it an extra bad idea. But the saying of course dates to when most farmers saved out some of one year’s crop in order to plant the next year’s; and did eat (and/or sell) the rest.)
Of course there are earlier threads:
But I’m really curious, OP, where you have seen the phrase in the past to be familiar with it, but to have not seen the context that it is an aphorism and not a hygene tip? It seems like interpreting it literally would be a non-sequiter.
Oddly enough, this is where I saw the use of the phrase to refer to office romances!
Well, the clearest example is a friend once telling me about this old guy he knew who at some point in the day would always leave the farmhouse and go down the hill and disappear into the woods for a little while. My friend asked the guy what this was about and he said he was taught never to shit where he ate, so he wasn’t going to shit in the house. I think this was the first time I had heard the expression. I have heard the phrase since used in the non-literal way, certainly. But there are many expressions used both in literal and figurative ways, surely with a significant number of them starting literally and growing to be used primarily figuratively. Now, for instance, I hear people use the expression “hoisted by his own petard”, which I suppose must have originated in battle but is now widely enough used that the expression even means something to people who don’t actually know what a “petard” is.
Since the same expression could be used figuratively or literally, there’s an interesting phrase-origins aspect to how its use evolves. I did realize this phrase could be used to recommend against office romances, but really didn’t know to what degree it had crystallized around that particular usage, or was still used more broadly to say “don’t do nasty things where they will stick around to harm you”, or was still used in the original sense in which I first learned it. Or, for that matter, whether the old guy quoted to me was reclaiming a phrase that had already long evolved away from the way he was using it.
The next day, he finds a bear shitting in his living room. The bear says (this was a talking bear) “If it’s good enough for you, it’s good enough for me!”
You’ve obviously haven’t had much experience with cattle, or, as mentioned upthread, horses. Cows will shit while they’re eating.
Apparently the audience didn’t necessarily know what a petard was even when Shakespeare used it:
“Although Shakespeare’s audiences were probably not familiar with the origin of the word, the related French word petarade was in common use in English by the 17th century meaning “gun shot of farting” making it appear likely that the double-meaning was intended by the Bard as a joke.”
I first heard the phrase from a Sopranos episode meaning exactly this. Tony was advising an underling not to run a scam on Tony’s childhood friend (i.e. where the boss ate).