Shit
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"We wanna know! Where does the shit go?" --Envy (2004) by Barry Levinson "We don’t need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit’". --Naked Lunch (1959) by William S. Burroughs |
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Shit or shite is a vulgar word in Modern English vulgarly denoting feces, the byproduct of digestion. It is a native English word, but following the Norman Conquest, Norman, Anglo-Norman, French, and Latin terms for many common objects and bodily functions began to be seen as more distinguished than native words, and thereafter feces became the accepted English noun, to defecate became the accepted English verb, and shit was no longer used in polite company.
Etymology
The word is likely derived from Old English, having the nouns scite (dung, attested only in place names) and scitte (diarrhoea) and the verb scītan (to defecate, attested only in bescītan, to cover with excrement); eventually it morphed into Middle English schītte (excrement), schyt (diarrhoea) and shiten (to defecate), and it is virtually certain that it was used in some form by preliterate Germanic tribes at the time of the Roman Empire. The word may be further traced to Proto-Germanic *skit-, and ultimately to Proto-Indo-European *skheid- "cut, separate", the same root believed to have become the word shed. The word has several cognates in modern Germanic languages, such as German Scheiße, Dutch schijt, Swedish skit, Icelandic skítur, Norwegian skitt etc. Ancient Greek had 'skōr' (gen. 'skatos' hence 'scato-'), from Proto-Indo-European *sker-, which is likely unrelated.
See also
- Defecation#In_art
- Profanity
- Seven dirty words
- Bullshit
- Crap
- Enshittification
- Feces
- History of Shit by Dominique Laporte
Namesakes
