The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Mythical Acronyms

Can you take another chapter on the same subject? Good, because we have something to clear up: shit and fuck, or more precisely, SHIT and FUCK.

You might have heard the story that both these words are acronyms. This is absolute twaddle.

The story goes that manure gives off methane. So far, so true. But then the story continues that when manure is transported on a ship, it needs to be stored right at the top of the boat to stop the methane building up to explosive levels in the cargo hold. So the words Store High In Transit used to be stamped on bags of manure before they were loaded onto a boat. Store High In Transit then got shortened to its initials – S.H.I.T. – and that was the start of shit.

It’s an ingenious explanation and whoever thought it up at least deserves credit for imagination. Unfortunately it’s absolute manure. Shit can be traced back to the Old English verb scitan (which meant exactly what it does today), and further back to Proto-Germanic skit (the Germans still say scheisse), and all the way to the Proto-Indo-European word (c. 4000 BC) skhei, which meant to separate or divide, presumably on the basis that you separated yourself from your faeces. Shed (as in shed your skin) comes from the same root, and so does schism.

An odd little aspect of this etymology is that when Proto-Indo-European arrived in the Italian peninsula they used skhei to mean separate or distinguish. If you could tell two things apart then you knew them, and so the Latin word for know became scire. From that you got the Latin word scientia, which meant knowledge, and from that we got the word science. This means that science is, etymologically, shit. It also means that knowing your shit, etymologically, means that you’re good at physics and chemistry.

Also, as conscience comes from the same root, the phrase I don’t give a shit is thoroughly appropriate.

The other acronymic myth that we need to stamp out is that fuck is a legal term. The commonly believed myth runs that once upon a time, when sex could land you in jail, people could be taken to court and charged For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge. Nothing of the sort is true and there has never been such a term in English law.

The first recorded fuckers were actually monks. There was a monastery in the English city of Ely, and in an anonymous fifteenth-century poem somebody mentioned that the monks might have acquired some dirty habits. The poem is in a strange combination of Latin and English, but the lines with which we are concerned run thus:

Which seems to mean:

The modern spelling of fuck is first recorded in 1535, and this time it’s bishops who are at it. According to a contemporary writer, bishops ‘may fuck their fill and be unmarried’. In between those two there’s a brief reference by the Master of Brasenose College, Oxford to a ‘fuckin Abbot’. So it seems that the rules of celibacy weren’t being taken too seriously in the medieval church.

Some scholars, though, trace the word fuck to even earlier roots. The etymologist Carl Buck claimed to have found a man from 1278 who rejoiced in the name John Le Fucker, but nobody since has been able to find the reference and some even suspect that Buck made it up as a joke. Also, even if John Le Fucker did ever exist, he was probably really John Le Fulcher or John the Soldier.

Acronyms are, I’m afraid, mainly myths. Posh does not mean Port Out Starboard Home and wog never stood for Wily Oriental Gentleman. There was a famous cabal formed of Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale, all conspiring against Charles II. But that was coincidence; the word had already been around for centuries.

But some acronyms do exist, just not where you might expect to find them. There’s one hidden away in The Sound of Music that relates straight back to John the Baptist.