Good Reason

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Shit? or the Shit?

An amusing post from Geoffrey at Language Log about shit.

The sentence I didn’t write shit today is ambiguous: the idiomatic meaning typically says you didn’t write (or at best, you wrote essentially nothing); the literal meaning typically says that you did write, and what you wrote could not be described as shit. But, I just noticed today, the two roughly opposed meanings can both be true in the same situation!

It reminded me of a bumper sticker on the back of a pick-up truck in my hometown:

If you ain’t a cowboy, you ain’t shit!

Which led us to wonder: does this mean that if you are a cowboy, you are shit?

But let’s not forget another usage: not just any shit, but the shit. ‘Shit’ is just shitty, but if you are truly great, my friend, you are the shit.

Emilio wasn’t afraid of shit, he didn’t run away from shit, cuz he was the shit.

Whence this difference? We could cop out and say that ‘the shit’ is simply a non-compositional multi-word expression. But naming something is not explaining it, and surely someone would see through all that jargon, and expose us for the frauds we are.

Alas, the OED Online does not have an entry for ‘the shit’. My best guess: By analogy with the template “Something is the something.” E.g. “You are the cat’s pajamas.” Note that this is how the superlative is normally formed in English: ‘the’ + adjective-est.

Students have asked me if I would do a lecture on swear words. I said no because I didn’t want to feel like Bob Sagat at the end of a lecture. But it is interesting.

2 Comments

  1. So it seems you’re over your aversion to the s___ word.

    Obviously, this post isn’t really anonymous, but I didn’t feel like agonising over a username tonight.

    When is the blog on the chocolate cake coming out?

  2. So it seems you’re over your aversion to the s___ word.

    Well, not really. I still don’t choose to use it in ordinary conversation. But as a linguist, lexical items are my meat, and this is one.

    The vegetarian side of this blog has been sadly neglected. But I may try to lean that way one day.

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