Don't be full of shit.

     It's not that I'm a fan of obscenity, per se.
     Rather, I like effective communication, and occasionally that means a well-delivered swear. There is "please be quiet" and "shhhh" and "shut up" and "shut the fuck up," each registering the same idea with varying degrees of emphasis. But that last one is the fire axe behind glass, when you really want someone to stop talking.
     That name of this blog, as I've remarked before, is meant to be exclusionary. Like one of those "You Must Be This High" sticks at the entrance to a roller coaster. If you can't measure up, this is not for you. If "every goddamn day," ruffles your feathers, then stay the fuck away. "Not everything is for children," as the great Robert Crumb once observed. "Not everything is for everybody."

     Which makes it ironic that I write for a newspaper, one of the few media realms where obscenity is tightly restricted. Oh, we make exceptions — when Donald Trump called Haiti a "shithole," we ran that unexpunged — a sort of precursor to this week's Supreme Court ruling. If the president says it, it's printable.
     I wish the situation were otherwise. Every time the paper gets a new editor, I ritualistically suggest writing a column that begins, "Fuck this," introducing the word into the Sun-Times lexicon for the first time in 76 years. They always say no, which gives me a hint that, yet again, we're being led by editors more concerned about offending a few readers than they are about attracting a lot more.
     Part of it might be generational. I was recently at the Apple store with a lady about my age who, in buying an iPhone, deployed the Germanic monosyllable for excrement — see, it's plainer just to say "shit." The sales clerk, a woman in her 20s, seemed genuinely taken aback, so much so that my companion apologized. Later, the clerk admitted she sometimes uses the word herself; the "I'm just not used to hearing it spoken by old people" went unvoiced.           

     Politics is another realm where dirty words cause notice. You don't expect obscenity in the state of the union, for instance. And I was surprised, in a good way, to see Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, say in her personal X feed: "Anyone who claims that I would say that we can't win in Michigan is full of shit."

     You go, girl. I felt like sending her tweet to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra which, if you recall, got its underwear in a knot because I quoted one of its musicians saying "shit," twice. There is a backstory there. I found the usage so refreshing, uttered in the grandeur of Symphony Center, that after I wrote my column, I phoned my boss and asked if we couldn't, this one time, use the word undashed, so as not to soften its impact. He said no, unsurprisingly enough, and I went along — I follow style, I don't set it.

     But I share this background because some readers felt I used the quote maliciously, when I really, sincerely included it admiringly. Though the admiration curdled when the CSO informed me that my attention was no longer welcome. Writing has consequences, or should. Which is why so many do it badly — it isn't that they can't assemble words, though that is often a problem too. But they aren't willing to take the heat.

      "Shit" is a good word because it conveys the noxious quality of the substance being discussed. It's "dog poop" when deposited on a lawn and scooped up in a plastic bag, but dog shit when you step in it. That's a valuable distinction. I probably use it more as an interjection, "Shit honey, we need to do our taxes...." than as a noun.

    Originally the word was a verb related to separation — shit was the thing left behind. Thus the word "schism" is related; it's "scheiße" in German, a word I sometimes deployed in younger days, influenced by Thomas Pynchon, trying to give a vaguely menacing Teutonic air and, I imagine, failing miserably.

     "Shit" is a milder obscenity than "fuck." We can see that in Norman Mailer's 1948 war novel "The Naked and the Dead." He was forced, famously, to replace "fuck" with "fug," but "shit" was fine, unleashed 14 times, including the essential "shit-storm." 

    As late as the 1970s, my 1978 Oxford English Dictionary ignores one of the most common words in the English language, moving straight from Fucivorous,"Eating, or subsisting, on sea-weed" to Fuco'd, "beautified with fucus, painted." 

    But Shit, on the other hand, gets the full treatment, after the prim trigger warning, "Not now in decent use," posted before unspooling, "Excrement from the bowels, dung." and giving a first usage dated 1585, ""Dond flytter, shit shytter," though it appears in Alexander Montgomerie's poem, "The Flyting Betwixt Montgomerie and Polwart," that seems to have been actually published in 1621 and is described as a "lyrical joust" between two poets, quite similar to rap put-downs.

     The OED truncates the full line, which should be shared in its entirety: "Dond flytter, shit shytter, bacon bytter, all defyld!" The poem is quite fond of the term, using it 11 times, and I'm not sure the OED took the best example. I liked: "They fand the shit all beshitten in his own shearne," that last term being a synonym for shit.  (And yes, Wednesday morning I looked up from my dip into obscene Scottish insult poetry, at the summer rain falling hard, and thought, "I'm living my best life!")

      The second OED definition is "A contemptuous epithet applied to a person," and this usage is older still, also Scottish. "A schit, but wit.'   

     There are some noteworthy cognates. The aforementioned "shitten," "defiled with excrement" goes back to 1386. Shitfire "a contemptuous epithet applied to a hot-tempered person" deserved reviving, as does Shit-breech — though I would update it to "shit-pants" and apply it to the young. Shit sack "an opprobrious name applied to non-comformists" would also come in handy, though there really isn't a public morality to conform to anymore.

     In his notes to Capt. Francis Grose's "A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue," Eric Partridge gives a lengthy explanation of how "shit sack" was tied to nonconformity during the Restoration, involving a frightened preacher and the sack he was hiding in. He also explores its World War I usage: "In 1914-1918 the soldiers used either shit or shit-house of any unpopular person (very rarely of a woman); they used it also as an expletive, cf. Fr. merde! ... Pre-War was in the shit, in trouble; but a specifically military application was: in the mud and slush, in mud and danger, in great or constant danger; and shit meant also shelling, especially shelling with shrapnel."

    There's more. Wentworth and Flexner's "Dictionary of American Slang" gives a dozen more definitions that are almost too familiar —- lousy merchandise, poor performances, "any talk or writing intended to deceive" not to overlook the essential "shit list."

     I won't go through all the phrases — "shit on a shingle," etc. — though did admire "shit in high cotton" defined as "To live more prosperously, pleasantly or luxuriously than one has formerly."

    Though my copy dates to 1975, Wentworth and Flexner note the growing acceptability of shit. "Wide Armed Forces use during W.W.II and the general loosening of moral restrictions and taboos has encouraged 'shit' uses among all strata of the population."

    Even the governor of Michigan. About time. Linguistic daring implies courage in other realms. Our nation needs that. Because otherwise we're up shit creek without a paddle.