Our word investigator reports back that shit is not an acronym, to which we respond, “No shit, Sherlock.”
How appropriate that the Internet neo-etymologists are spreading informational manure about the word shit. The supposed origin of this ancient word is “traced” (with crayons, I would suggest) to nautical transport. When hauling dried manure on board seagoing vessels (manure being the jewel of the international sea trade after all), seafarers were careful to stack said treasure atop other cargo. If the manure were to be so unfortunately placed as to soak up some water, it would release methane into the trapped space, causing a prodigious explosion should Long John Silver slip into the room for a quick surreptitious smoke, arrh mateys! So, anything containing potential methane-based detonators was marked S.H.I.T. to communicate the instruction, “Ship High in Transit.”
First, let’s tackle the logic:
Actually, most of the stuff that the acronym spells out comes from the colon in the first place, but then again, this isn’t an anatomical tract (and no pun intended on tract, either).
1) How often do we translate potential disaster-averting instructions to their initials, when perhaps clarity might serve us well? The signs say “Fire Exit,” not “F.E.” The words “This End Up,” and not the initials “T.E.U.,” are stamped on the sides of packing crates. “Baby on Board,” and not “B.O.B.” (and a good thing, too, since that sign has prevented me from intentionally ramming other vehicles numerous times—“Save the babies!”). And on and on.
2) Who's gonna stack manure on top of, oh, say, spices in the first place?
3) Wouldn’t these sailors be a little more concerned about the reliability of a ship whose cargo holds might flood than the potential of said flood triggering a Rube Goldbergian series of unlikely events leading to massive detonations? You don’t have to worry much about methane gas when you’re 30 fathoms deep and still descending.
4) Wouldn’t something more mundane and connected have a little more credibility as a source of an acronym? Like “Sit High In the Throneroom”—even that flippant concoction makes more sense than the transit nonsense.
Shit is one of a number of words assigned acronymic origins that are dubious if not ridiculous. Other such words are posh (see page 58 ),fuck (61), wop (page 67), golf (60), phat (page 67) and tips (65). Such acronymic concoctions are sometimes a guess at words of unknown origin. Sometimes they’re tools of someone with an agenda. Sometimes they’re just BS. And you can say the same about much of folk etymology.
56
Bill Brohaugh
In any case, why don’t the people who make this stuff up ever select long words like pleonasm, Machiavellian, or radial-keratotomy and turn them into acronyms? Why don’t they take boring common words and assign them boring origins, perhaps suggesting that door is an acronym of “Don’t Open Our Roof” or nose results from “Nasal Orifice South of Eyes” or, if the source is Latin, “Noble Orifice South of Eyes”? Because such construction isn’t a good line of shit. Unless the word is shit itself.
To help you identify such baloney-filled etymologies, consider the English Skeptic’s Rules of Acronymity, otherwise known as “Specious Histories & Ignorant Twaddle”: 19
• Rule i of Specious Histories & Ignorant Twaddle: If the word is older than your great-great-grandpappy, the acronym-based etymology is false. The particular fecal word we’re discussing here traces back to Old English and other Old Languages, and ultimately back to Proto-European *skei-. 2 ° On the other hand, the very mechanism of creating words from the initial letters of phrases traces back to Proto-Last-Week in linguistic terms. David Wilton in his Word Myths writes, “There is only one known pre-twentieth-century word with an acronymic origin and it was in vogue for only a short time in 1886. The word is colinderies or colinda, an acronym for the Colonial and Indian Exposition held in London in that year.” I’d like to usurp a recent word creation to define this type of word “construction.” Anacronym, a blending of anachronism and acronym, has been defined as an acronym whose founding letters you have forgotten, like laser, which stands for “Light-Amplified Something or othER.” But that definition suggests the word is old, not that it’s out of synch with its time—for instance, if the
19 Alternate acronym sources: “Stupid Humor in Taxonomy,” “Syllable Hype, Internet Trash,” and “Sloppy, Hopelessly Inane Theories.” By the way, I hope to spread the Internet rumor that shit is an acronym meaning “Shit High in Transit,” and see if anyone gets the joke.
“Even though asterisks sometimes signal footnotes, and even though this is a footnote, the asterisk here and elsewhere identifies words that we believe existed by extrapolation rather than actual observation. Have I put you to sleep yet?
laser was mentioned in a novel set in the Renaissance. Da Vinci wasn’t that smart. I submit that the word anacronym is better used to mean an acronym that, like Da Vinci’s laser, couldn’t possible have been part of the word’s history. So, usurper that I am, let’s call this one the “Rule of Anacronymy.”
• Rule 2 of Specious Histories & Ignorant Twaddle: If the supposed source words make you blush, snicker, or belch, the acronym- based etymology is false.
• Rule 3 of Specious Histories & Ignorant Twaddle: If the resulting word makes you blush, snicker, or belch, the acronym-based etymology is false.
• Rule 4 of Specious Histories & Ignorant Twaddle: If the resulting word was spelled in different ways over time, the acronym-based etymology is false. Consider a real acronymic creation: snafu. People argue about the specific words that added up to snafu, but no one disagrees about the spelling.
• Rule 5 of Specious Histories & Ignorant Twaddle: If you learned about the word from the Internet, which is often no more than an electronic upgrade of mimeographs pasted on bulletin boards and scribblings on bathroom walls, the acronym-based analogy is false. Let’s call this the “Rule of Bullshitternet.”
• Rule 6 of Specious Histories & Ignorant Twaddle: If the resulting word doesn’t consolidate a proper name, usually of an organization (e.g., NATO, PETA), it is increasingly likely that the acronym- based etymology is false.
• Rule 7 of Specious Histories & Ignorant Twaddle: If the resulting word is not military (such as, AWOL, WAC, humvee, jeep, and even, yes, snafu), technological (RAM, laser), or both (sonar, radar), the acronym-based etymology likely is false. I once worked for a
Bill Brohaugh
58
computer consultancy, which is where I surmised that all things computer had to be boiled down to three-letter initialisms or acronyms.
Rule 7 of Specious Histories & Ignorant Twaddle, Corollary A:
If the origin is supposedly nautical, the acronym-based etymology likely is false. See specifically posh in the entry immediately following this one, but also refer again to David Wilton: “there is a tendency among some nautical enthusiasts to attribute a maritime origin to just about every word and phrase they can think of. This tendency is so common that one of the participants in the www.wordorigins.org online discussion group dubbed it CANOE, or the Conspiracy to Attribute Nautical Origins to Everything.” In other words, there is S.H.I.T. in your CANOE (or perhaps more appropriately the reverse).
So, after all that, you’re certainly curious about the false origin of the word acronym. Well, as I would note to our friends, the Internet neoetymologists, acronym is an acronym of A Constant Repetition of Nonsense, You Moron.