On Words -- EXPLICIT
06/10/2014 01:23 p.m.
I feel the time has come to decriminalize the word “shit” and liberate it from the prison of vulgarity it has long been confined to. Simply said, “shit” provides too much utility to be considered offensive.

Shit is everywhere, it is integral to the circle and cycles of life, it is both proof and product of a fulfilling day, and none of the synonyms we've conjured up out of dead languages (“manure” and “defecate” and “fecal matter”) or toddler-babble (“poo-poo” and “doo-doo” and “caca”) or weighty metaphor (“dump” and “load” and “mud”) or mildly coarse exclamation (“crap” and “poop” and “turd”) or Greek architecture (“stool” for “pillar”) capture the reality or immensity that the direct, four-letter, purebred English word “shit” does – indeed, they are all attempts at painting a verbal veneer over – and thus avoiding by locutionary acrobatics – the fact of our own excrement, the infallible inevitability of shit itself. Try as you might to convince yourself and the world around you otherwise, shit happens.

You simply cannot enter a bathroom and declare that it smells like defecate in there, and you sure as shit can't say it smells like poo-poo. In fact, it doesn't smell “like” anything. What it smells of is steaming, stinking, un-flushed shit. No simile is warranted when shit is involved: shit is the ultimate, unmitigated, irreducible reality, shit is the Lacanian Real itself. Anyone who has changed a diaper knows that Junior didn't doo-doo in there: that little monster took a repugnant baby shit – even your shit-eating dogs are repulsed by that vile shit. And while telling a story you may narrate yourself as the Campbellian hero who found himself knee-deep in sheep-dip, we all know that when you were actually there, shitting your pants, you were knee deep in one thing and one thing only: shit. No one is falling for your bullshit.

Speaking of which: you can portray yourself as a sweet little flower and insist to the world that what you did was “take a dump” but what you actually did was leave a shit. All the potpourri in the world isn't going to change the fact that you did, you shitty shit shitter you.

Death and taxes may be certain but nothing is as sure as shit – even a champion constipation suffer knows it is coming and he is reminded of it constantly. That shit is always heading our way, and when it gets here that shit is hitting the fan. We even categorize shit: bull-shit, dog-shit, the classic but nearly forgotten fish-shit. For every human weakness and failing and vulgarity, there's a shit that fits.

Even the word itself is constructed solidly – a proverbial brick-shit-house of a word, no unnecessary accoutrements, just the shit that's needed and none of the shit that isn't. The first somewhat sibilant syllable slides out of you, short or strung-out, either the shushing “shhhhhh” that fails to stem the tide or the short “sh” of the champagne cork popped, forewarning of the inevitability of shit even as it struggles against the scatological giving-birth of itself. And what is born is the only syllable – itself a word – that could possibly follow: “it.” Shit is the ultimate “it” – the ultimate object, the ultimate not-I. Only cadavers, themselves a form of shit, both a precursor to and a product of shit, compare in their effect on us: the revulsion, the desire to pull away, the totality in which our minds, bodies, and language do everything possible to ensure a separation from it, the literal and figurative burial of that shit – I am not that shit; get me away from that shit.

Yet we literally eat shit – every vegetable, every animal that feeds on vegetables or that tears into the bodies (and thus intestines) of other animals is the result of shit. The food chain nothing but the serialization of the transmogrification of one kind of shit into another kind of shit until that shit comes full circle. And there's no avoiding it: internally, we depend on intestinal flora – another potpourri synonym, distancing us from the microbial, symbiotic, shitty reality – for the bulk of our nutrition: we house bacteria who feed off our shit and provide us nutrients in the form of their own shit.

Do not deny this shit any longer – stop silencing shit.