Know Your Shit: The Complete Usage, Science and History of the Word

By Gary Marinin and Timothy Jay

Did you know that there are over 1,000 ways to use "shit"? That's just in North American English alone! You'll probably learn more than you ever wanted to with Know Your Shit. It dives into the general history and psychology of swearing in general, but takes a particular focus on "shit" in American and Canadian English. Uses of "shit" are explai

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gary Marinin
• Release date: Nov 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737840725

Gary Marinin

Gary is an English teacher and digital nomad from Worcester, MA. He's a jack of all trades having a B.S. in sociology, performing years of voulnteer work with African refugees and disabled people, spending eight years in the army, and trying out various careers, like bartending, bookkeeping and social media management before getting back into teaching. Being a digital nomad allows him to travel and work on projects that he's passionate about. His online students from around the world usually have interesting cultural questions, which sometimes lead to fun projects, like "Know Your Shit". If you'd like to get in touch, drop him a line...https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-marinin-b701663b/

Book preview

Preface

TO MY DEAR READER, I’D like to give you my sincere appreciation for purchasing this book and contributing to my ability to make future projects. *Or expressing enough interest to spend the time pirating it, in which you can donate through Paypal to [e-mail]

I wanted to write about "shit" because taboo words are heard so frequently and they’re not usually directed at people in a negative way, but just used to describe things or emotional states. My aim for this project is to help ESL and EFL students learn slang and colloquial language and bring humor to the world, to both native or non-native speakers. I had so much time during this pandemic that I was able to really organize my thoughts and analyze this idea, which determined to be a good one. I had my reservations at first, but as I kept thinking, searching and talking to people, I kept finding new things. Even when I thought I had maxed out the usages after seven months, I’d discover something new. It was a lot of fun watching movies and series or looking at literature to explore the variety of ways people used terms, especially discovering some unique origin stories and histories. This book mainly focuses on American and Canadian uses of shit because I wanted a North American focus, but an international edition is in the works. My goal with this project is to reduce the stigmas about swearing, show the diversity of the word and help people with their creativity. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I did writing and researching it. Feel free to reach out any time with questions or comments to [e-mail].

Metalanguage

BEFORE WE START EXPLORING THE terms, we should discuss a little metalanguage (language about language). I hope you find this list useful as we explore "shit" in its general forms.

I won’t hold it against you if you skip this section. Metalanguage can be useful for discussing language and making sure meanings are clear, but it shouldn’t take away from enjoyment. It’s my goal to make you a shit master and that means conveying my ideas as clearly as possible. If you don’t study language or never learned another one, these can feel like foreign terms, but now you’ll at least know the basics.

A noun is a person, place or thing, like Ben Franklin, a hospital or a phone.

An adjective is something to describe a noun, like red, big, or happy.

A verb is an action, like run, watch or drive.

An adverb describes what’s happening with a verb, like slowly, busily or alertly.

A comparative is comparing or saying a similarity between two or more things, like the ocean is colder than the sea.

A superlative is the highest degree or when there’s one of something, like the best or the fastest.

An exclamation is something that expresses an extreme emotion, like surprise or anger: what the fuck!

A phrasal verb is two words being put together that make a different meaning than when they’re on their own, like to be stressed out, to put something away or to try something on.

An idiom is a group of words that only make sense together, like to be better late than never, to tell someone to break a leg or to feel under the weather.

A collocation is when two words are commonly found together, like black and white or salt and pepper. You sometimes see this with "shit", like badass shit or good shit.

Let’s talk about swearing: A.K.A. Let’s talk about shit

" Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit…"

— When you Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris

YOU’RE READING THIS BECAUSE YOU understand the value of shit and other taboo words. Or maybe you don’t, and wish to. While the subject has recently been popularized by the book, "Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing, by Melissa Mohr, and a Netflix series, The History of Swear Words, it has been researched for a long time. It’s just linguistics, but try not to be scared of technical terms. I always hate when people say don’t be…". I’ll tell you how I feel, not the other way around. What makes a word taboo? There’s nothing stopping any word from technically becoming one, but there’s some specific criteria. It really comes down to its ability to offend. Andersson and Trugil’s¹ general definition is:

Refer to something that is taboo, offensive, impolite, or forbidden in the culture.

Can be used to express strong emotions, most usually of anger;

May evoke strong emotions, most usually of anger or anxiety;

Include the strongest and most offensive words in a culture—stronger than slang and colloquial language; and

May also be used in a humorous way and can be a marker of group Identity².

Shit definitely fits all of these definitions in some way, but how much and for how much longer? Could it be completely normalized? Colloquial English is nothing more than how words are used in casual conversation by native speakers, and in this case, every use of shit. Measuring frequency of taboo words in conversation has been done, but it’s hard to put together a non-biased study. Paul Cameron highlighted some difficulties in this with recording what people overheard in person, in conversations or pristine conditions³. In 1969, he found that in 8% of college students’, 3% of adults’ workplace and 13% of adults’ leisure time conversations included swearing. If they weren’t being observed, I’m betting that those numbers would’ve been higher. Education also seems to be trending in the wrong direction, so as we move toward the movie Idiocracy being less of a comedy and more like a documentary, these percentages could also increase.

Psychologist Timothy Jay has a few fascinating books on taboo words that were published as early as 1992, like Cursing in America, and he’s also been publishing in academic journals on the topic since 1980, speaking at universities across the country and doing interviews. He made distinctions between the types of dirty words, like cursing, profanity, blasphemy, taboo, obscenity, slang, epithets, insults and slurs, vulgarity and scatology⁴, which each have their own causes for why people react a particular way to them. If we look at shit in particular, there are many uses and some uses can be listed in several categories because of its diversity. With the explanations of the terms later, you’ll see how diverse some of these are and how they’ve evolved.

Shit was once considered quite vulgar and offensive, but has now lost much of its power and is used more commonly. The main reason for the transformation of any word is that they all have a lifecycle. Words become more accepted for a variety of reasons, like for the fact that it’s been heard enough, adopted into the mainstream or societal changes and gives rise to the power of a new set of offensive words. An example of societal and taboo word changes came from the shift of being very religious, which regards blasphemy, like telling someone to go to hell or saying Jesus Christ out of anger, to be the most taboo thing you could do. During Massachusetts’ colonial years, you could be put to death for blasphemy until 1697⁵! I don’t know how society is going to change, but it’s becoming more inclusive, so maybe this societal shift gives rise to a set of taboo words that go against inclusivity. I could see words like faggot, butch, and dike becoming as offensive as fuck was when I was growing up. They’re still offensive now, but they could become significantly more offensive as time passes.

As you’ll see through all the phrases in this book, there are subtle nuances relevant to every situation and who’s saying it. "There’s shit everywhere" (feel free to read this in Bob Saget’s voice) in English speaking societies. The thing to note about phrases and expressions with shit, is that many of them have absolutely nothing to do with the act of defecating or the product of it. They revolve around metaphors, connotative meanings and people’s interpretations. For example, if you say that someone is going to eat that shit up, we know they’re not actually going to eat someone’s waste, but they’re going to believe someone that’s insincere. In To Shit Someone, when Bob Saget says, I’m not shitting you, it’s important to tell the difference between denotative (literal) and connotative (figurative) meaning. He plays with this denotative meaning because he states that he will literally die if he shat you. Intonation also plays a large role because one phrase or expression can have multiple meanings. An adult calling a child a little shit can be done in anger or it can be done playfully, as a term of endearment. Kids sometimes do things we find funny, but have to pretend that it’s wrong because of their age. In that situation, you could use little shit in a more playful way and the child will still know that they did wrong. In this book you will find approximately 1,000 uses of shit, with a focus on colloquial English. Native speakers of any language have a command of vulgarity that will always be difficult for non-native speakers to fully grasp, so I hope that this guide helps.

The use of the word shit has become so normalized that we hear it in casual conversation, during daytime television, in comic books… you name it, it’s probably there. Aside from several lawsuits, some of which we’ll explore, it used to create a lot of shock and awe when said in any setting. George Carlin knew the taboo and laws against vulgarity in the US, but he elected to perform his famous skit in 1972 on WBIA, a Pacifica radio station, anyways, "Seven Words you can Never Say on Television". A religious man then filed a complaint with the FCC after the broadcast and legal action was taken against the radio station, resulting in FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. The ruling by the US supreme court was major and it was that vulgarity couldn’t be said during hours that children were most likely to be awake, but you could say shit, bitch, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits between 10pm and 6am. The court’s ruling also paved the