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Shit is a vernacular word in Modern English denoting feces, the waste product of digestion. It is an old and 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. It is therefore a swear word and can be classed as a use of 'slang', for example, "Shit!" used as an expletive, or in a non-pejorative manner, used as in 'that's the shit' to mean 'that's good'. The term "shit" can also be used to describe poor conditions, for example, "This is shit!", or to refer to several types of illegal drugs, "This shit is good!". It can also be used as a vulgar replacement of the word "stuff", as in "I'm just going to pick my shit up."
Usage
The word shit (or alternatively shite in Scotland, Ireland, Northern England and Lincolnshire) is used by English speakers, but it is considered an obscenity, and thus is usually avoided in formal speech. A less vulgar substitute is crap, which while still impolite and/or emphatic, is not considered obscene. The correct vernacular usage of crap is mostly identical, with certain key exceptions (see below). Many people receive satisfaction from the usage of the word and see it as, subsequently, a good way to relieve stress. Such phrases include Oh shit!, or the more polite Shit-ake Mushrooms!. Used in a sentence one may say, for example, 'I have shit on my shoe' or 'You smell of shit!' or, 'Holy Shit' The latter phrase is particularly popular in the South London and North Kent areas of the United Kingdom. These can refer to the literal meaning or merely as a vulgar insult.
Most expressly, in English, shit carries an encompassing variety of figurative meanings. Of these, perhaps the most common are generic expressions of displeasure (as in, Shit!), fear (Oh, shit!), or surprise (Holy shit!).
Shit (shite in Scotland, Northern England and Lincolnshire) can comfortably stand in for the terms bad and nothing in many instances (Dinner was good, but the movie was shit. You're all mad at me, but I didn't do shit!). Many usages are idiomatic. The phrase, I don't give a shit denotes indifference. I'm shit out of luck usually refers to someone who is at the end of their wits or who has no remaining viable options. That little shit shot me in the ass, suggests an individual of small rectitude.
However, in such a nominative construction, crap (as in, That little crap shot me in the ass) is not accepted vernacular English. A more likely phrasing would be, that little crap-head, or that little turd. Of further note is that little shit is common as a term of opprobrium, while big shit is unfamiliar, and that direct scatological appellations are rarely applied to females, for whom gender-specific terms such as bitch or cunt more readily accrue.
In Get your shit (or shite) together! the term may refer to some set of personal belongings or tools, or to one's wits, composure, or attention to the task at hand. He doesn't have his shit together suggests he is failing rather broadly, with the onus laid to multiple personal shortcomings, rather than bad luck or outside forces. Shit can even be a plain, neuter pronoun for basically anything in vulgar speech, e.g. in There is some serious shit(e) going down shit can easily be replaced by stuff with no real loss of meaning (the same goes for Get your shit together! and the like).
While the most common uses of shit are figurative, the unpleasant substance to which the term literally refers is seldom entirely absent, and thus most uses of shit have some degree of pejoration. But this is far from a universal rule: In some styles of discourse, shit can replace nearly any noun.
Perhaps the only constant connotation that shit reliably carries is that the referent to which it applies holds some degree of emotional intensity for the speaker. Whether offense is taken at hearing the word varies greatly according to listener and situation, and is related to age and social class: elderly speakers and those of (or attaining to) higher socioeconomic strata tend to use it more privately and selectively than younger and more blue-collar speakers. Regardless, it is highly improbable that any native English speaker of any age or social position can truthfully claim never to have used the word. Moreover, in some colloquial speech, calling something or someone the shit is laudatory. For instance, Dave's new car is the shit, suggests that Dave's new car is very good, or very cool. This meaning is also essentially a substitution for the term stuff, but is also similar to the vernacular usage of bad to mean dangerous and deserving of respect. Crap is unknown in such locutions.
Adjective
As an adjective, to be shitty usually denotes low quality: This is a shitty train. It can mean to emotionally or physically un-well: John felt shitty today, or, referring to an action, it can mean to be contemptible or immoral: That was a shitty thing to do to her. The noun form is often interchangeable with the adjectival, especially when referring to objects and intangibles. Ex.: This is a shit train, or The weather was shit today. The positive adjective form is to refer to something as being "the shit." This usage is often used to refer to; oneself "I'm the Shit!", an event "That concert was the shit!", or anything particularly great "Tangerines are the shit!"Conversely, in parts of Northern England, the phrase "shit hot" can denote something being of high quality, or pleasurable. For example "That film was shit hot!" means that the film was very good.
The verb to shit
The verb, to shit, is most commonly used to refer to the literal act of defecation, but it can also mean to treat badly or to humiliate (I got shit on for being late, He shit all over my project), or to produce something carelessly (I was hoping for a project we could all be proud of, but Dave just goes and shits something out at the last minute). The past participle of to shit is attested as shat, shit, or shitted, depending on dialect and sometimes the rhythm of the sentence. In American English shit as a past participle is always correct, while shat is generally acceptable and shitted is uncommon. In the Prologue of the Canterbury Tales, "shitten" is used as the past participle.Usage of shits occurs in three types of common English. Although not formal, shits as a verb (Mark shits in the morning) is still correct, but this tense is not widely used, as takes a shit is more direct in meaning. As a noun (Those little shits) refers to children or people of low status, such as Freshman to upper classmen on any level. Lastly, the shits is euphemistic for diarrhea (That bean burrito dip gave me the shits!!).
Shit (like fuck) is often used more to add emphasis than meaning: Shit! I was so shit-scared of that shithead that I shit-talked him into dropping out of the karate match. The term, to shit-talk, connotes bragging or exaggeration (whereas to talk shit primarily means to gossip someone in a damaging way or to talk in a boastful way about things which are erroneous in nature), but in such constructions as the above, the word shit often functions as an interjection. Euphemisms for shit in this usage include shoot, shucks, and in Hiberno-English sugar and its Irish equivalent siúcra (pronounced .
Shit itself can be a quasi-euphemism, many illicit drugs (notably hashish) being referred to as shit. To be shitfaced is to be extremely drunk.
Other parts of speech
Non-native English speakers should take note that shit and fuck often serve different uses as expletives, such that (for instance) the gerund, shitting, is rarely used emphatically. Ex.: In the sentence, I was so shit-scared of that shithead that I shit-talked him into dropping out of the shitting karate match, the phrase, shitting karate match, would be incomprehensible to native speakers except in suggesting a singularly unsanitary form of karate. (In the UK, phrases such as shitting hell as an emphatic are not unknown.) A correct and clear vulgarism would be, the fucking karate match. Similarly, shit is never used as an infix: While in-fucking-credible is comprehensible English, in-shitting-credible is not. Shit you! is likewise a puzzling and ineffective expression of defiance. It is not uncommon, however, to encounter an adjective constructed partially of the word shit, such as "Shittastic" or "Shittacular".Sometimes in family movies, some actors let the word shit slip, but then stretch it into a harmless word. An example of this occurring are in Spy Kids, where Carmen is heard to say, "Oh, shit...take mushrooms." The euphemism was also written into Island Of Lost Dreams .282002.29, where Carmen says, "You are full of shiitake mushrooms." (The crowd was offended anyway.)
In parts of Canada, a "shit-disturber" ("shitstirrer" in the UK) is a person who deliberately causes trouble or who is aggravating. A "shitload" or "shitton" is a large amount of something, e.g. "I have a shitload of laundry to do today". "Shitkickers" are large boots.
In the West of Ireland, particularly around Limerick as well as in Belfast and Dublin, the expression 'Shit Head' is often used as a spiteful and derogative term of personal abuse.
'There was Jack Shit'is also used in these cities. It means ;there was nothing.
"Shit" is very commonly used in the Dutch language, expressing a general discomfort with a certain situation ("Shit!"), or to describe the situation itself. ("I'm in deep shit"). It is not as offensive to Dutch speakers as it is to English, but one would not use it in a formal situation. The use of it by children is discouraged by adults, teaching them substitutes like chips (In Dutch pronounced as the English ships). "Shit" is most commonly used as a replacement of the more obscene word "kut", meaning "cunt", "Kut" is mostly used in the same way as "shit" is in the Dutch language.
Some users of English in the Far East use the expression nose shit to describe the fragments of dried nasal mucus which occasionally exit (deliberately or accidentally) from the nostrils. Similarly, expressions eye shit and less commonly ear shit describe discharge of the eye, dried or still moist, and ear wax, respectively. Or Shit as in " Holy Shit" can be used. The Shit doesn't not in fact have holes, but is referred to due to the strong reference to the word "Holy"
Acceptance
Recently the word shit has become increasingly acceptable on American cable television and radio (in Britain and Australia this has been the case for some time, although fuck and cunt remain mainly taboo). Certain songs with the word shit in them have recently slipped past censors on the radio.
A good example is the episode of South Park "It Hits The Fan" originally aired on June 20, 2001. It is one of the most notable episodes of the show. It is best known for its repeated use of the word shit. (To be precise, the word is used 162 times: a counter in the corner of the screen tallies the repetitions.) The moral of this episode (signaled by the cheesy music and Stan or Kyle saying "I learned something today") is that swearing is okay occasionally, but if it is done over and over and over, it takes away from a word's impact and the word gets very, very boring. However, these shows all appear on American cable networks, outside the influence of the FCC, so their censorship is strictly voluntary.
In Canada, shit is often aired uncensored on tv on subscription channels or on the broadcasting networks after 9 pm. A good example is the Canadian sitcom Trailer Park Boys where words like shit, fuck, and even creative phrases like "shitbat" are used many times per episode, it should be noted that that particular show airs on cable television as opposed to a main broadcasting station.
In the song "Man in the Box" by Alice in Chains, the line "Buried in my shit" was played unedited over most rock radio stations. Often such words in pop songs are blurred together and cannot be understood sufficiently to be recognized by fans, much less cause offense to censors. However, many large pop hits have nevertheless included the word. Pink Floyd's hit "Money," originally released in 1973, refers to "bullshit," a slightly less offensive form (which recently formed the title of one of the country's bestselling books). It is unknown whether the song was played in an edited form on radio.
The Bob Dylan song "Hurricane" has a line about having no idea "what kind of shit was about to go down". Both of these songs were released with a "radio edit" version that is now rarely played by increasingly popular satellite radio and smaller community stations throughout the United States.
However, American terrestrial radio stations with any significant audience must abide by vague FCC guidelines on obscenity lest they be saddled with crippling fines, as has happened recently. These guidelines do not define exactly what constitutes obscenity, but it has certainly been interpreted by some commissioners as including any form of words like shit and fuck, for whatever use, rude or not. Thus the word shit is actually less likely to be heard today than a decade or two ago. The recent song, "Hollaback Girl" by Gwen Stefani contains the phrase, "This shit is bananas," in the album version of the song, but the popular music video had the phrase instead playing as, "This shhh is bananas, b a n a n a s!", or "This sh-beep is bananas, b a n a n a s! (repeated)" where 'shit' was the only word deemed worthy of censorship. Terrestrial radio is also decreasingly popular for the type of music and talk programming where the word might be used, perhaps due to this climate of fear among station managers.
On July 17, 2006, during a Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the midst of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, President of the United States George W. Bush was unkonwingly caught on an open microphone saying, "See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over," to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Bush's comment was widely reported throughout the world.
On July 17, 2006, NRL chief executive David Gallop reprimanded the game's premier Rugby League player, Andrew Johns , who was sprung yelling the expletive "c..." on Fox Sports. "No! This can't be happening. It's a big game. We've worked our c...s out, both teams, only for it to turn on a s... decision like that ... it's a game for men," Johns said.
In general life however, shit is only accepted in some places. It is being increasingly accepted throughout countries all over the world. For example if someone was to stub their toe, they might slip up and swear. If someone else was to overhear this swear, they often accept it. So basically, saying the word "shit" in public after someone hurts themselves, is often accepted in today's world.
See also
"Shit"