Crap

Here's a modest etymological query (or maybe, as Mrs D recently remarked, it's an entomological one, since it's been bugging me for a while). When i was younger, we used the word crap to mean "shoddy" or poorly made. It had some metaphorical equivalence to the word shit. So, a Ford Pinto, for example, could be referred to as a "piece of crap" or a "piece of shit" with equal gusto, and everyone knew what you were saying.

But the literal use of "crap" to mean "shit" was not part of my vocabulary. We wouldn't, for example, have used the phrase "he crapped his pants," or yelled at a neighbor, "Hey, your dog crapped in my garden." The word for that was "shit." So i can, i guess, understand how this linguistic shift took place. And probably why it took place, since we need a word for the physical object "shit" which we can use in more or less polite company that doesn't provoke the same snicker that, say, "feces" does. Crap functions equally as well as a verb, just like shit does.

But when did this change take place? It's like i woke up one day two years ago, and found that my neighbors were fertilizing their garden with chicken crap and horse crap. Anybody know?

Continue reading Crap