Your Basic Porcelain Throne Musing

“Crap.  Crapolla.  Feces.  Turd.  Poop.  Doo-doo.  The list of euphemisms is endless when it comes to that most basic of bodily excrements—shit,” he pondered as he sat upon a toilet awaiting his own body to work through the process of eliminating waste product.  “Basically, what is this stuff?  A by-product of what we eat, yet as a society we scorn its existence, as if the human body could survive without the regular purging of its own digestive tract.”

          His mind then began to wander over the subject in a more scientific manner.  He was curious as to what the medical folks had discovered about shit.  He recalled that he had once asked his doctor whether or not it was possible to determine if one had the correct balance of fiber in one’s body based on the consistency of one’s own feces.  The doctor was both stumped by the question and repelled by the though of contemplating such a subject.  Yet, there have to be medicos who have studied the subject.

          “So, Mrs. Young, what type of doctor is your son?”  inquired the lady of her companion at the spa.

          “He’s a proctologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins Medical School and he specializes in the study of the excremental processes,” came the response.

          “That’s impressive.  In other words, he’s a doctor of shit, or perhaps a shitty doctor?”

          “He does take a lot of crap over his job,” the sardonic mother intoned.

          But really, surly some biologists and medical doctors know something about this generally unspoken of field of study.  People suffer from constipation and diarrhea, and there are medicines to relieve such problems.  There are all those ads on TV for fiber filled drinks and tablets for “regularity.”  So somewhere, someone is looking into shit and its nature to create these medicinal aids.  How would you write a research grant for this field?  Who would fund such research?  Proctor and Gamble?  Is that where the name “proctologist” came from—the Proctor of Proctor and Gamble?

          “But I digress,” he thought.  “What about all the permutations of the word’s usage.”  For example:

          “Eat shit” sometimes linked with the perhaps more extreme command, “and die.”  Which would be worse, to be forced to actually eat shit and then be left alive to remember the experience, or eat shit and then die?  

          “Tough shit,” which generally means “I don’t care.”  Did that expression come about through the pain people suffered from constipation, and someone else not caring that the other person was hurting from a clogged ass?

          “Beat the shit out of,” generally means to defeat another person or group to the point of humiliation.  “The Cubs beat the shit out of the Cardinals,” is a usage of the phrase seldom heard, but one for which Cubs fans long.  While in a baseball motif, there was once the newspaper clipping he had seen were a typo indicated that a certain major league player was in a “shitting slump.”  Maybe that is a form of constipation.

          “When the shit hits the fan,” gets used a lot.  In polite company the phrase is sometimes rendered “When the ship hits the sand,” but either expression denotes a situation in which something bad happens.  Does the phrase have its origins in a situation in which actual shit hit a fan and was thus spread across a wide area and onto many people?   A sort of misplaced manure spreader?  A manure spreader, the one product the manufacturer will not stand behind.

          “Get your shit together” is another common usage.  Did this phrase have its origins in a mother’s constant nagging of her son to clean up his totally messy room, the “shit” in this case being all the “stuff” lying around the room? 

          And that brings to mind a curious thought about the connotations of the word.  In the “get your shit together” phrase, the connotation of “shit” can be either good or bad.  In “this is some good shit,” the connotation is positive in that the grass is high quality.  Conversely, “you’re in deep shit,” and “this ain’t worth a shit,” have the connotation that shit is bad.  “Shit and shoved in it” is also a phrase that infers that the newly created pile of fecal matter is something that one has had the misfortune on having fallen back into.

          Since the word “shit” is considered vulgar, the rules governing when it can or should be used do not exist.  Hence an attractive woman can be referred to as “her shit is hot,” while her nose-in-the-air attitude caused by her good looks would be referred to as “she thinks her shit doesn’t stink.”

          And then there’s the union of the profane and the scared —“holy shit!”  Now, this does create a myriad of possibilities.  Can something be both disgusting and sanctified?  What defines it?  When Pope Saint Hyginus (136-140) had a bowel movement, did he produce “holy shit?”  During the Middle Ages when Europeans were preoccupied with the relics of saints, did anyone ever try to pass off a turd of St. Francis of Assisi as a relic?  If a sinner suffering from severe constipation suddenly has relief and thanks God for the easing of pain, is that “holy shit?”

          “Enough!” he thought.  “I’ve gotta get more fiber in my diet.  These mind trips while I’m waiting for the passage of one of the Rockies are pushing my psyche into some deep shit.”