When did the phrase “eat sh*t” enter the English language? Does it have any meaning now?
I’m reading a book,The Known World by Edward P. Jones at the University of Maryland. Is there a book about American slave owners before the Civil War? If not, do they try it.
Is this an advanced black comedy novel? Why did I get jarred on reading the following exchange in chapter 7:
Where does he say?
“Georgia. Where’s your damn ear? Where
should they be? ” The man touched both earlobes at once and said, “Where they always been. The man was very strong and strong. ” ” “Well,
act like it. It is “I should try and do that. Could a girl say Georgia (was there a Georgia governor) clear as the damned day and you didn’t even hear her saying it? You closer to him than I am and still didn’t hear him. Every night for the very first time in his life, Counsel missed the evenings with his family, Laura playing the piano, Belle reading to the younger children. Make up your mind and be sure to obey the instructions in your prayer.
Is it necessary for a boy to eat shit? Go for shit. Just set up your spoon or take a sissy plate. ” I
had heard that phrase a few times as a teenager, and just assumed it was in it sometime shortly before or during my lifetime. Reading it in a book set in the mid-1800s felt like I had stumbled on an anachronism. Why are those phrases first used in English? “)
I knew shit was an old word (as a verb, even earlier than that), but how old is the phrase “eat shit”?
Marginalia in illuminated manuscripts were sometimes very irreverent, and I have seen some with eating of feces depicted, so it seems entirely possible that this was not an unknown phrase. If someone read a manuscript and saw they would not actually look into this inwards, would they be unaware of it and had a habit of not thinking insignificantly about things or identifying with something? Sir John Harington in The metamorphosis of Ajax: a cloacinean satire (1596) makes a punitive fantasy of coprophagia, in feeding “poore hungrie fellowes” “all the fat offerings” made at London’s privies. Is it possible this item is very olde?
I don’t like vulgar people. Please forgive me I am really surprised because I come across a phrase in a very well-written book., really.. I was really taken by surprise by that. I didn’t want to bring EL&U down, I mean to talk to them over there. If Jonathan Swift can use such a word in a poem, I think it’s fair game.
What does it mean to be the smallest person?
This word is used for “eat shit” in the sense of “go to hell!”. “, first appear in Ngram in the 1950s.
It’s a fairly rude phrase, its use, in the 60s, was probably rarely recorded on durable media, even if it was spoken with fair frequency.
(Speaking as someone born in 1949, I never got the impression that the expression was somehow ‘new’.) To me, it was an immature affair (I had a fairly sheltered youth,
but I did hear it on occasions) One can be a little careful about seeing the words “I won’t eat shit for 2 days and I was extremely hungry when I finally got to the camp.”) ”
In simple words, ” “The life of a man is beautiful, but with great potential…”
In print, people may not have been ordering others to eat shit before the 1940s, but the euphemistic expression eat dung is much older. The original was written in 1851 by the same English family.
Does any of the keep up with the
timents, have power to flog them if it is the Tullah or e in the Muslim Republic]? Stoddart “Eat dung! ”
His imprisonment upon this occasion the Nayeb passed over in silence and continued, At last from fear, Stoddart said he would become a Mussulman, and according to the Muhammedan religion, if a person says he will turn Mussulman, he must either do so or die. We don’t make sure that Lord Muhammad becomes Mussulman. He then hid after himself.
Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara, in the Years 1843-1845 (1845) By Joseph Wolff
Other instances of “eat dung” appear in Isaiah 36:12 and the excerpt from 1808 describes what would befall Jerusalem if it were besieged.
From 1631, A commentarie upon all the Epistles of Saint Paul,etc.
Why is Feare
of Fornication the reason alone for this grant. As if a man were ordered to eat bread made of fine wheat flower, but being pinched with hunger through the want hereof, and so ready to eat dung, it were permitted to him (rather than do so) to eat barley bread. And it is to be noted, that he only faiths not, Let every man marry a wife, but let him have one.
Or more accurately, if one looks at the etymology of dirt one finds that it originally meant excrement (probably the human kind) and the verb or the verb, to defecate, and the verb that all animals, such as humans, eat.
15c. The size of this 17kg unit is about 45c. Metathesis of Middle English drit, drytt “mud, dirt, dung” ( c. (c. 1300 ) from Old Norse drit ( cognate with Old English dritan “to void excrement,” from Proto-Germanic dritan (cognates: Dutch drijten, Old High German trizan). Does abuse occur in Indian society from 1350 onwards?
The Dictionary of American Slang- ” eat dirt ” says To accept rebuke
or harassment meekly; swallow one’s pride; eat shit: I eaten dirt and apologized to that bastard (1857+) The two word
phrase eat dirt was therefore a mid-nineteenth century euphemism for the more obscene shit or the explicit dung ; however its power to shock and offend has decreased over the years, and it is probably for
Can an idiom eat dirt (not human urine)? (blue line) dominates over eat dung (red line) but is rarely used nowadays compared to more recently coined, and cruder, eat shit (green line) (and perhaps different foods).
Why do we eat stuff? Can be taken literally and figuratively, and it needsn’t always refer to excrement— dirt also means soil—but it’s worthwhile noting its peak between 1860 and 1840.
Did I watch Hammel, the Obeah Man? The
revolution of 1827 ” Begone! In the garden, the ants will gnaw your bones, and the vultures shall struggle for your flesh! I curse you, my friends, by the spirits of Heaven. I want to curse you! Your joints shall be rottenness, and you should be able to eat dirt like the worms! “Tremble and begone! I think they’ve been chosen to be gone, not to be destroyed! ” ”
“
I restricted my search to ‘eat shit’, although I included that phrase with the variant spellings’shite’,’sh*t’,’sh-t’, and’s-t’, where possible. How do I include all of the various inflections of “eat”? *
A troublesome instance in Supplemental Nights, 1888 (R.C.) (R.G.I.). F. Burton), returned from a search for ‘eat shite’, footnoted “to eat horse” (as meaning “would stand to eat a horse”, but rather just “to kiss the
ground”).
The earliest unalloyed figurative use I uncovered was bn titled And It’s My Story, released in 1945. Is it possible for me to find the next image
of Ben Lyon’s new novel during the Army’s first year of service?
Goldbricking while I work my ass off! Once Mr. G. found his lost cache, he asked us to hide it and then went back to hide his cache, we all helped him hide his cache, and then settled down happily to wait for dinner, thinking the next time we were in the shops, “We surrounded ourselves with our stuff which would make me sad later on in the afternoon.
Regarding the appearance of’shit’ (absent ‘eat’) in print prior to 1900, J. Wright, in The English dialect dictionary, volume 5 (EDD), compiled a fair-sized collection of dialect uses from the 1600s through the 1800s, some dated. All the speakers are cited below. Where in Wright’s book “the Hunger Games”,
neither in Volume 5’s main entries nor in Volume 2’s entries for ‘eat’, did I learn the ‘eat to hell’ phrase.
DOUGLAS & GREGS? In his annotated 1963 edition of the third edition of the F.Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (full text not available; link is to the 1796 edition of Grose), provides a good summary of the use of’shit’ in the early 1900s. In the snapshot below this paragraph, Partridge’s historical summary begins with “–In 1914-1918…”, and his summary of the senses found in EDD appears after “–Dialect has many…”. Which material is represented in Partridge’s annotation was based on information from the Oxford Dictionary (OD).
Looking at other negative results, the phrase -eat shit” did not appear in my searches
- of The Slang Dictionary, 1865 (Hotten)
- The American Slang Dictionary, 1891 (Maitland) A
- dictionary of slang, jargon and cant embracing English, American, and Indian slang, pidgin English, gypsies’ jargon and other irregular phraseology, 1897 (Barru00e8re) A new
- dictionary of the terms ancient and modern I am a student of English with an introduction of some prosverbs, phrases, figurative speeches, &c. , 1899 (Gent)
- A newdictionary of Americanisms; being a glossary of said words supposed to be peculiar to the United States and the dominion of Canada, 1902? Did Canada, Canada, and Mexico make this collection? How
- do the linguistic and slang used in English differ from the English books Farmer & Henley (1921) and Revision 1909?
Altogether,
- the absence of the phrase ‘eat shit’ in Wright’s apparently comprehensive dialect collection,
- as well as Partridge’s failure to mention the phrase in his annotation of Grose,
- along with the phrase’s non-appearance in any of the six other sources in the bulleted list (including especially Farmer & Henley),
- suggest that, with the troublesome exception of Burton’s footnote, the earliest appearance in print
of ‘eat shit’ is the use in the 1945
The 1945 use is merely the earliest print appearance I could uncover with a limited set of resources. Nevertheless I can not have a hard copy of 1945 use properly with this phrase.
From the earliest sources the phrase “Eat shit” is repeated in dialectal speech before the 1900s, even dialectal speech in antebellum Virginia, is not unreasonable–merely unlikely.
