Claim: The word "shit" comes from an acronym for "Ship High in Transit."
Status: False.
Examples:
Sorry, guys!:
[Collected on the Internet, 2002]
History in the making!!!!
Fabulous bit of historical knowledge: Ever wonder where the word shit comes
from ... well here it is
Certain types of manure used to be transported (as everything was back then)
by ship ... well in dry form it weighs a lot less, but once water (at sea)
hit it, it not only became heavier, but the process of fermentation began
again, and one of the by products is methane gas . . . and as the stuff was
stored below decks in bundles you can see what could (and did) happen,
methane began to build up below decks and the first time someone came below
at night with a lantern . . . BOOOOM! Several ships were destroyed in this
manner before it was discovered what was happening. After that the bundles
of manure where always stamped with the term S.H.I.T on them which meant to
the sailors to "Ship High In Transit". In other words high enough off the
lower decks so that any water that came into the hold would not touch this
volatile cargo and start the production of methane.
Bet you didn't know that one.
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[Collected on the Internet, 1999]
In the 1800's, cow pie's were collected on the prairie and boxed and loaded
on steam ships to burn instead of wood. Wood was not only hard to find, but
heavy to move around and store.
When the boxes of cow pie's were in the sun for days on board the ships,
they would smell bad. So when the manure was boxed up, they stamped the
outside of the box, S.H.I.T. . . which means Ship High In Transit.
When people came aboard the ship and said,"Oh what is that smell!" They were
told it was shit.
That is where the saying came from . . . It smells like shit!
Origins: This
sorry piece of codswallop about exploding ships appears to have begun its
Internet life in February 2002. Its cousin, the "bad smelling steamship
fuel" tale (second example quoted above), began its online life as an April
1999 post to the USENET discussion list rec.humor. Akin to the faux
etymology of the word 'f**k,' a specious acronym has once again been claimed
as the origin of yet another term beloved of potty-mouths everywhere.
We could launch into a long, involved discussion of ancient shipping
practices, methane production and properties, and Internet leg-pulls, but
we'll spare you all that, as the fanciful stories listed can easily be
debunked as the product of someone's wild imaginings through linguistic
means.
The word shit entered modern English language derived from the Old English
nouns scite and the Middle Low German schite, both meaning "dung," and the
Old English noun scitte, meaning "diarrhea." Our most treasured cuss word
has been with us a long time, showing up in written works both as a noun and
as a verb as far back as the 14th century.
Scite can trace its roots back to the proto-Germanic root skit-, which
brought us the German scheissen, Dutch schijten, Swedish skita, and Danish
skide. Skit- comes from the Indo-European root skheid- for "split, divide,
separate," thus shit is distantly related to schism and schist. (If you're
wondering what a verb root for the act of separating one thing from another
would have to do with excrement, it was in the sense of the body's
eliminating its waste -- "separating" from it, so to speak. Sort of the
opposite of today's "getting one's shit together.")
Barbara "shit disturber" Mikkelson
Last updated: 13 August 2002
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