Usage
The word shit (or sometimes shite in British and Irish English) is used by English speakers, but it is usually avoided in formal speech. Minced oath substitutes for the word shit in English include sugar and shoot.
In the word's literal sense, it has a rather small range of common usages. An unspecified or collective occurrence of feces is generally shit or some shit; a single deposit of feces is sometimes a shit or a piece of shit, and to defecate is to shit, to take a shit and a new variant to leave a shit. While it is common to speak of shit as existing in a pile, a load, a hunk and other quantities and configurations, such expressions flourish most strongly in the figurative. For practical purposes, when actual defecation and excreta are spoken of in English, it is either through creative euphemism or with a vague and fairly rigid literalism.
"Shit" can also be combined with other words to denote the type of feces one has. For instance, "snake shit" describes feces that are long and thin in shape, thus reminiscent of a snake's appearance.
Shit carries an encompassing variety of figurative meanings, explained in the following sections.
Piece of shit may also be used figuratively to describe a particularly loathsome individual.
Read more about this topic: Shit
Famous quotes containing the word usage:
“Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates—but pages
Might be filled up, as vainly as before,
With the sad usage of all sorts of sages,
Who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore!
The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“I am using it [the word ‘perceive’] here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word.”
—A.J. (Alfred Jules)
“...Often the accurate answer to a usage question begins, “It depends.” And what it depends on most often is where you are, who you are, who your listeners or readers are, and what your purpose in speaking or writing is.”
—Kenneth G. Wilson (b. 1923)