Imagine a word so volatile that network television
banned it for decades. Right. Completely off
limits. But at the same time it's so essential
that global health workers literally rely on
it to save lives. Yeah. It's it's a wild paradox
because usually when you open the dictionary
there's this expectation of order. You know for
sure. Nouns over here verbs over there. Exactly.
Every word has a clear definition and just stays
safely within its designated lane. Right. But
today. We are, we're skipping the polite sections.
We are opening the dictionary to its messiest,
most untamed page. Oh yeah, we're getting it
with. Because we need to look at a word that
defies... basically every rule we learned in
grade school. We really are. We're diving into
the Wikipedia page for a highly unusual, definitely
slightly taboo, but incredibly fascinating subject.
We're talking about the versatile four letter
word S -H -I -T. Yep, the big one. And whether
you drop it into casual conversation on a daily
basis or you actively avoid it at all costs,
you have a relationship with this word. Oh, absolutely.
Everyone does. And the mission of this Custom
-tailored deep dive is to prove to you that this
isn't just like modern slang or vulgarity Just
for the sake of shock value. Yeah, it's an absolute
master class in linguistic evolution. Okay, let's
unpack this Let's do it. So our goal today is
to move right past that initial taboo We're going
to examine its ancient etymology, the surprising
grammatical gymnastics our brains unconsciously
perform to use it. Which is my favorite part,
by the way. Right. It's so cool. And we'll also
look at its rocky history in media and censorship.
And then finally, its highly effective real -world
utility in global public health. Yeah. So before
we can even begin to understand how you or I
might use this word today, We need to know where
it came from. We have to go way back. Exactly.
Yeah. Because this is not some recent invention
by, you know, rebellious teenagers. This is a
rugged, ancient piece of human history. It really
is. The word is likely derived from Old English.
So back before the Norman conquest, speakers
used the noun sight. S -C -I -T -E. OK, sight.
Yeah. And it was heavily used to describe dung.
Mostly appearing in, like, geographical place
names, actually. Wait, really? Just naming places
after Dung? Basically, yeah. And they also use
the variation site to describe diarrhea and the
verb scetan, which meant to defecate. Wow. And
I mean, as the language evolved into Middle English,
it morphed into Shet, right? Exactly. Which makes
total sense when you look at how agricultural
societies operated. But the real linguistic archaeology
goes much further back than Old English. Oh,
it goes way back. It traces all the way back
to Proto -Germanic with the root skit SKIT with
a hyphen. And I love how linguists figure this
out, because it's not like they have written
records of this, right? Right, no written records
at all. The way they figure it out is by looking
at its modern Germanic cousins scattered all
across Europe today. So you have the German Scheisse,
the Dutch Schiet, the Swedish Skit, the Icelandic
Skitor. And they basically just reverse engineer
it. Exactly. By reverse engineering the phonetic
shifts in all those modern languages, linguists
can pinpoint the exact ancestral root they all
share. That is just so cool. And that leads us
to the absolute best part of this archaeological
dig, which is the Proto -Indo -European root,
like the granddaddy of the word. Yeah, the P
-I -E root. It's S -K -A -D -S -K -H -E -I -D.
And it literally translates to the action of
to cut or separate. Which is just, I mean, poetic
irony of the highest order. It really is. A word
for bodily waste. shares the exact same linguistic
DNA as the concept of shedding or separating
from the body. Because it's literally what your
body is shedding. Right. It's the physical act
of separation. And just to clear the air for
anyone wondering about the medical side of things.
It is completely unrelated to the ancient Greek
word ster. Oh, right, which gives us the medical
prefix scato, like scatology. Exactly. Two totally
different family trees. Yeah. And what's fascinating
here is that preliterate Germanic tribes were
likely using a version of this exact word at
the very same time the Roman Empire was at its
peak. That's crazy to think about. Right. Like,
when you use it today, you aren't just swearing.
You are connecting directly to an ancient visceral
piece of human history. Yeah, it survived the
fall of empires, the Norman conquest, centuries
of linguistic overhaul. And not only did it survive,
it adapted. It completely adapted. It morphed
into a modern multipurpose tool. I mean, it's
less like a Swiss army knife and more like linguistic
stem cells. Oh, I like that comparison. Yeah,
because it has no fixed shape until you put it
in a sentence and then it instantly morphs into
whatever grammatical tissue you need. That's
a great way to put it, because in its literal
sense, it has a surprise. a surprisingly small
range of uses, right? Just describing a deposit
of feces or the act of defecating. Right, just
the basic biology. But figuratively, it has completely
taken over the English language. It frequently
functions as a vague generic mass noun very similar
to the word stuff. You hear it all the time,
especially in the United States. Someone will
say, this show is funny as shit. Yeah, exactly.
Or get your shit together. Which, by the way,
if you tell someone they don't have their shit
together, it doesn't mean they've just run into
bad luck. No. It's a very specific critique.
Right. It specifically means their affairs are
disordered because of their own personal shortcomings.
Yeah. And then you can even shoot the shit, which
strips the word of any negative connotation completely.
It just means having a friendly, you know, pointless
conversation. Exactly. And then there's this
incredible dichotomy created by simply adding
an article to the word. Oh, sis, my favorite
part. Like... If you call an object a piece of
shit, you are denoting exactly poor quality.
Right. It's a very precise insult. You aren't
saying the whole process is bad. Just that specific
component. But if you prefix it with the like
the shit. Yeah. It completely flips. It suddenly
means the absolute best. It does. But I have
to push back here, though. OK, go for it. Calling
something this shit just sounds like, you know,
1990s hip hop slang. Yeah. Are linguists really
treating a modern slang trend? as a fundamental
grammatical rule of the word? They absolutely
are, because it highlights how syntax dictates
meaning faster than the dictionary does. Okay,
how so? Well, think about it. You cannot say
something is the crap or the garbage and have
it mean supreme excellence. Oh, wow. Yeah, you're
right. That doesn't work at all. Right. The human
brain effortlessly processes a sentence where
this one specific vulgarity means the highest
possible praise purely based on the presence
of the word thee. That is wild. And this extreme
versatility is taken so seriously by academics
that a study published in 2017 actually argued
for a cross -disciplinary metafield called shit
studies. Shit studies? You're telling me some
rhetorician actually had to stand in front of
a committee and defend that grand proposal? They
did, and they won the argument. That's amazing.
Yeah. The study examined rhetoric and human communication,
specifically focusing on the mechanics of bullshit.
OK. The researchers found that bullshit speech
is fundamentally a one -sided discourse. It contains
ideological barriers that basically block the
expectation of mutuality. Wait, let's bring that
down for the listener. What does that actually
look like in practice? OK, so think about a scenario
where you ask your boss why the departmental
budget was cut. OK, relatable. Right. And instead
of giving you a straight answer, they launch
into a 10 -minute monologue about, you know,
synergizing downstream corporate paradigms. Oh,
yeah. The corporate word salad. Exactly. That
is what the researchers classify as bullshit.
By using dense, meaningless jargon to claim expertise
on a topic, the speaker is setting up verbal
barriers to deflect critical responses. Wow.
So it's not just a word. It's an active shield
against criticism. Exactly. And the study, which
used examples ranging from antisemitism to elite
wine tasting, shows that the vulgarity isn't
just a bad word. Rhetoric scholars treat it as
a serious metric for mapping how human beings
manipulate communication and establish power
dynamics. That is fascinating. And that perfectly
transitions into how we use it for imagery, I
think. Oh, definitely. Because the sheer flexibility
of the word naturally leads into these highly
visual, often darkly humorous idioms that describe
human suffering and dominance. The visual mechanics
of these idioms are incredibly striking. Like,
if you are in severe difficulty with no apparent
solution, you are... up shit creek or up shit
creek without a paddle if things are really bad
right and if a massive amount of trouble is happening
all at once it's a shit storm here's where it
gets really interesting All these idioms rely
on a visceral, universal human disgust. Yeah,
they really do. Think about the last time your
car broke down on the highway at midnight and
your phone died. Your brain doesn't reach for
the word trouble. No, it doesn't. Your brain
immediately reaches for I am up shit creek because
it needs a word that matches your sudden spike
in blood pressure. If we connect this to the
bigger picture, the word reliably carries extreme
emotional intensity. Like, trouble is an abstract
intellectual concept. But when you say, when
the shit hits the fan, you force the listener
to instantly visualize a messy, highly unpleasant
physical situation. Yeah, you really do. And
that imagery actually stems from the literal
mechanics of a manure spreader on a farm. Oh,
wow. Really? Yeah. If that biological substance
strikes the rotating blades of a fan, nobody
he wants to be in the exact same room. It commands
an instant universal understanding of chaos.
It paints a very clear picture. Same with a shit
sandwich. Oh yeah. It describes a terribly unpleasant
situation made only slightly more palatable by
packaging it in less unpleasant things. Right,
like the old joke. Exactly. The joke is that
life is a shit sandwich and the more bread meaning
money you have, the less of the filling you have
to eat. That's a classic. We also have deeply
ingrained phrases like build like a brick shithouse.
Which means two entirely different things depending
on which hemisphere you are standing in. It does.
It's so funny. Yeah. In the United States, it's
traditionally used to compliment a curvaceous
woman. But in other English speaking countries
like Australia or the UK, it's used to compliment
a highly athletic muscular man. And the origin
of that phrase is purely architectural, which
is why it denotes such sturdy physical presence.
OK, how so? Well, historically, most outhouses
were flimsy ramshackle affairs made of thin plywood
or scrap sheets of metal, like a stiff wind could
knock them over. Right. So an outhouse built
out of solid brick was an absolute unit of construction.
It was enduring. That makes so much sense. Just
like the aphorism, you can't polish shit, which
means you can't make something inherently bad
into something good. Right. Though, fun fact,
the TV show Mythbusters actually proved that
you physically can polish a piece of feces by
rolling it in dirt and using a Japanese polishing
technique. I remember that. It was incredible.
But linguistically... the point stands. And beyond
just chaos and architecture, we also use the
word to display pure dominance over someone else.
Yeah, dominance is a major category for this
vocabulary. The military phrase eat shit and
die is a classic example. It sounds like a random
curse, but it actually serves as a grim checklist.
It names the three most basic biological functions
humans are forced to do. Eat, excrete and expire.
I never realized it was literally just the biological
timeline of the human condition reduced to four
words. That is dark. It is. You also have phrases
like, you ain't shit, to express intimidation
and clearly tell someone they are completely
worthless. Or describing an exceptionally arrogant
person by saying, he's shit don't stink. Oh,
that's a great one. And the grammatical incorrectness
of don't instead of doesn't is actually a feature,
not a bug. It casually highlights the unwarranted
self -importance of the person you're insulting.
Absolutely. You also see pejoratives like shitkicker,
which was historically used to describe a menial
worker, and eventually evolved to describe a
fan of country and western music. It is just
fascinating that we have these strict unspoken
rules in our own heads about how to use this
word. Like we've talked about casual idioms,
but there are actually strict, unconscious grammatical
laws governing this profanity. There really are.
Let's look at how the word operates in the past
tense, for example. Depending on your regional
dialect, the past tense can be shat, shit, or
the much less common shitted. Shat is generally
acceptable in British and global English, while
shit functioning as its own past participle is
often considered correct in American English.
And my absolute favorite historical grammatical
note is that Geoffrey Chaucer, the undisputed
father of English literature, used shitten as
a past participle in the Canterbury Tales. Oh
wow. Yeah. So this word has serious foundational
literary pedigree. It definitely does. The classical
satirist Jonathan Swift even wrote a highly controversial
poem in 1732 called The Lady's Dressing Room.
Oh I've heard of this one. It ends with a lovesick
man sneaking into his beloved's room only to
have his romantic illusions utterly shattered
by the smell of her chamber pot. And he just
repeats the panicked lines. Oh Celia Celia Celia
shits. Oh my god. Yeah, the shock value entirely
relied on the strict taboo of attributing that
word to a refined woman. Just shattering the
polite illusion with biology. Exactly. But back
to those unconscious rules we all follow. The
word is used for emphasis all the time, just
like the word fuck. But, crucially, it cannot
be used as an infix. Right, so an infix is a
word inserted right into the middle of another
word. Like a prefix or suffix. But in the middle.
Exactly. You can say something is in -fucking
-credible. The profanity inserts perfectly before
the stressed syllable. That works phonologically.
Right. But if you try to say in -shit -incredible,
it sounds completely wrong to a native speaker.
It breaks an unconscious language rule. It's
like a secret phonetic code we all know, but
we're never explicitly taught. Even our most
rule -breaking curse words have strict grammatical
laws that we obey without thinking. We do. And
when we don't want to break the polite laws of
society, we build elaborate escape hatches, right?
Like minced oaths and acronyms. We absolutely
do. We replace it with shoot, shucks, or sugar.
Or we create acronyms so we can say the letters
instead of the word. Like S -O -L for when you
were severely out of luck. In corporate joke
emails or fake job applications, you might see
a requirement for special high -intensity training.
Or the classic phrase you hear in polite company
when someone stubs their toe. Sugar honey iced
tea. We go to enormous creative lengths to avoid
vocalizing it. And that avoidance is deeply tied
to demographics, actually. Oh, really? Yeah.
Linguistic studies show that elderly speakers
and people from higher socioeconomic strata tend
to use the word much more privately than younger,
blue -collar speakers. That makes sense. It's
true power as an exclamation, like when someone
gasps, holy shit, derives entirely from that
taboo. It is the direct juxtaposition of the
sacred and the profane collide. in a single phrase.
Which brings us to the ultimate friction point.
Because when you take this word out of our private
vocabularies and put it onto the public airwaves,
those internal rules clash violently with the
external rules of society. You really do. How
does a culture police a word this powerful? And
what happens when someone decides to just break
the broadcast taboo? Breaking the taboo has actually
produced major milestones in media history. According
to his own eulogy for his castmate, Graham Chapman,
the first person to say the word on British television
was John Cleese of Monty Python in the late 1960s.
Wow, Monty Python breaking boundaries as usual.
Right. Though it also quietly appeared in a 1966
British film called Caldasac. And in the United
States, George Carlin famously cemented it as
one of the seven words you can never say on TV,
in his legendary 1972 comedy routine. That's
a huge piece of history. Yeah, that routine actually
led to a Supreme Court case about the FCC's power
to regulate indecency. But the broadcast dam
eventually broke, right? It did. On October 14,
1999, an episode of the medical drama Chicago
Hope became the first show on U .S. network television,
excluding documentaries. Of course, to use the
word in its uncensored form. Oh, I remember that
being a huge deal. Yeah, the producers argued
it was clinically necessary for the emotional
reality of the scene. And because it's television,
that dramatic milestone was immediately parodied.
Of course it was. The cable show South Park aired
an episode called It Hits the Fan, specifically
to mock the media hype surrounding Chicago Hope.
Oh my gosh, yes. They used the word exactly 200
times in a single 22 -minute episode. That is
dedication to a bit. They even put a digital
counter in the corner of the screen to track
it for the viewer. 162 times spoken, 38 times
written. Since they were on cable, they operated
outside the FCC's strict broadcast regulations.
Right. Cable is different. Terrestrial radio,
however, is a very different story. Oh, yeah.
Radio is strict. Radio stations in the U .S.
must abide by FCC guidelines on obscenity because
they use public airwaves, yet the word frequently
sneaks through the censors. How so? Well, Pink
Floyd's hit Money features the line bullshit
and is frequently broadcast unedited. Alice in
Chains' Man in the Box has played unedited on
rock stations for decades. Wow, really? Yeah.
And Green Day performed live on Saturday Night
Live in 1994, and the singer dropped the word
right into the mic. It completely bypassed the
take delay. But a lot of times, the artists are
forced to compromise. You get the radio edits,
like Fergie's massive pop song, London Bridge,
had to entirely change its repeating background
lyric from, oh shit, to the incredibly sanitized,
oh snap. just to get airplay. Right. Euphemisms
are demanded in polite society and broadcast
media, but behind closed doors, people in power
don't have time for euphemisms. Oh, definitely
not. During the Watergate scandal, President
Richard Nixon was tape recorded in the Oval Office
telling his aides, I don't give a shit about
the lira. Which, I mean, he was dealing with
a massive political crisis that was threatening
his presidency. He didn't care about the fluctuating
Italian monetary system. Exactly. He deployed
the word to convey absolute indifference and
cut through the noise, which I think brings us
to perhaps the most important consequential use
of the word today. saving human lives. Yes, absolutely.
In global public health, there is a prominent
movement called community led total sanitation
or CLTS. It operates in developing countries
to stop the practice of open defecation, which
causes massive deadly disease outbreaks like
cholera. So what does this all mean? How can
a word be deemed too dangerous for a Fergie pop
song on the radio, but be considered an essential
life -saving tool in global sanitation campaigns?
This raises an important question about the fundamental
function of language. Euphemisms soften reality.
Right. If health workers go into a village facing
a cholera outbreak and hand out pamphlets about
feces or excreta, it sounds clinical. It sounds
distant. It doesn't create urgency in the local
population. It's just academic noise. It doesn't
trigger the human disgust reflex needed to actually
change behavior. Exactly the opposite of what's
needed. But when those health workers deliberately
use the crude local word, the exact equivalent
of our four letter word, it creates immediate
shock value. I see. It bypasses polite society
and hits the visceral emotional core we talked
about earlier with the manure spreader. When
you need urgent, decisive action. Whether you
are Richard Nixon trying to manage Watergate
or a public health worker trying to prevent a
deadly epidemic, you don't use polite terms.
You really don't. You bypass the botanical garden
of language entirely and you use the word that
guarantees an impact. That is just incredible.
We have traveled from the ancient proto -Indo
-European tribes roaming the earth to Geoffrey
Chaucer writing the Canterbury Tales, through
the highly architectural idioms of brick outhouses,
straight to South Park counters, and life -saving
sanitation campaigns. It really is the ultimate
linguistic tool. It is a word that continuously
adapts to whatever humanity needs it to be, a
noun, a verb, an exclamation of joy, a cry of
despair, or a literal lifesaver. It really covers
all the bases. with a final thought for you to
mull over. Consider the enormous lengths that
polite society goes to in order to avoid this
word. We create elaborate acronyms like sugar
honey iced tea. We invent radio edits to protect
the airways. We write massive volumes of SCC
guidelines. So much effort. Does censoring the
word actually strip it of its power? Or does
treating it like a forbidden taboo ensure that
it will remain the ultimate unbreakable linguistic
tool for generations to come? That's a great
question to think about. That wraps up our journey
through the wildest corner of the dictionary.
Thank you for joining us on this custom -tailored
deep dive, and as always, keep bringing your
curiosity to the table. Until next time.