A friend full of "shit."

The other day as I was over at a friends house I heard a nice little story about the origen of a word which we are all very familiar with. The word that was heard all over Nebraska in the overtime of the Husker game with Texas Tech. (That is just poor writing, no one wants to see that typed.) The word is shit, that is all the build up I can manage. Here's a nice email I found saying basically the same thing as my friend.

Subject: 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. 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, of which a by-product is methane gas.

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.

Here I always thought it was a golf term.

I found an etymology dictionary here.

I had heard in my language classes, that any exciting story about a word origin is probably wrong. Most of our words are going to be traced back to Old English, Latin, Greek, et cetra.

When I first heard the story I thought the word would have been much older than English sea trading. Or at least older than the Modern English language. The oldest use I saw of it was,

Lues animalium, quæ Anglice Scitta vocatur, Latine autem fluxus interaneorum dici potest.

Scitta is the word of interest. The sentence is something about cattle having diarrhea.

It is used again in the 14th century as a verb.

þey wolde ... make hem a pitte ... whan þey wolde schite ...; and whanne þey hadde i-schete þey wolde fille þe pitte agen."

I have no idea what that says, but again you can easyily choose the words, schite and schete. The combitnation of letter "sc" from Anglo-Saxon would later become "sh" in Modern english. It also stays very similar in other languages.

German Scheiss,
Dutch schijt,
Old Norse skita,
Lithuanian sikti,

The second problem I found with the story after doing some research is that acronyms were not really used untilthe 1900's. The first acronyms were made popular by the military(A.S.A.P., POW) Son of a bitch has been a phase since the 1700's but never used as SOB until 1918.

And the third reason that came to to raise a red flag off the bat was methane. Sure it hangs around shit. Here is what a physics teacher had to say about it.

M]ethane gas would not 'build up' in the hold of a ship. It is lighter than air and in any unsealed space would dissipate upward fast enough that an explosive mixture would not accumulate.

So I am just going to some it up with the bulleted list I stole from Douglas Harper and his entry about the topic.

the word itself is a good 1,000 years older than the common use of acronyms;

the original form of the word (Anglo-Saxon sc-, which regularly evolved into M.E. sh-) does not correspond to the supposed acronym;

the verb is the original form, the noun derives from it; the acronym supposes the noun came first;

no one has produced a single instance of this supposed acronym from any old mercantile record or ship's manifest;

in fact, no one has ever established that there was a custom of shipping manure;
the word has cognates in many other languages, including ones outside Germanic, for which no acronym theory of origin makes sense;