"Shit 
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 == ""Shit"" == 

 Shit or Shite is a vernacular word in Modern English denoting feces, the byproduct of digestion. It is an old and native English word, but following the Norman Conquest, Norman, Anglo-Norman, French, and Latin terms for many common objects and bodily functions began to be seen as more distinguished than native words, and thereafter feces became the accepted English noun, to defecate became the accepted English verb, and shit was no longer used in polite company. It is therefore a swear word and can be classed as 'slang'. 

 Etymology 
 Scholars trace the word back to Old Norse origin (skīta), and it is virtually certain that it was used in some form by preliterate Germanic tribes at the time of the Roman Empire. It was originally adopted into Old English as scitte, eventually morphing into Middle English schītte. The word may be further traced to Proto-Germanic *skit-, and ultimately to Proto-Indo-European *skheid-, "". Spoken and written substitutes for the word shit in American English include sugar and shoot. 

 Usage 
 The word shit (or sometimes shite in Scotland (depending on context), Northern England and Lincolnshire), is used by English speakers, but it is considered an obscenity, and thus is usually avoided in formal speech. A less vulgar substitute is crap, which while still impolite and/or emphatic, is not considered obscene. The correct vernacular usage of crap is mostly identical, with certain key exceptions (see below). Many people receive satisfaction from the usage of the word and see it as, subsequently, a good way to relieve stress. Such phrases include Oh shit!, or the more polite Shit-ake Mushrooms!. 

 Used in a sentence one may say 'I have shit on my shoe', 'You smell like shit!'. These can refer to the literal meaning or merely as a vulgar insult. 

 In the word's literal sense, it has a rather small range of common usages. In American English, 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, or counterintuitively to take 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 (pinching a loaf, laying some cable, seeing Mr. Brown off to the coast, dropping the kids off at the pool, brewing up a pot of s.h.i. tea, releasing the prisoners, lighting a bum cigar, cutting a log, dropping a deuce, making sausages, making butterfinger bb's, punching a grumper, busting a grumpy, releasing the demons, greeting the night, splitting the corn, taking a ride down the sunshine highway, seeing a man about a horse or wallaby', 'planting a brown carrot', 'giving birth to a brown babie', 'dropping a dagger', 'paying tribute to Dutch porn', ""taking the Browns to the Superbowl"") or with a vague and fairly rigid literalism. 

 Most expressly, in English, shit carries an encompassing variety of figurative meanings. Of these, perhaps the most common are generic expressions of displeasure (as in, Shit!), fear (Oh, shit!), or surprise (Holy shit!). 

 Shit denotes trouble, as in, I was in a lot of shit; low quality, as in, That disk drive is shit; unpleasantness, as in, Those pants look like shit, or This casserole tastes like shit; or falsehood or insincerity, as in, Don't give me that shit, or You're full of shit or surprised anger Jim is totally going to flip a shit when he sees that we wrecked his bike. The word bullshit also denotes false or insincere discourse. (Horseshit is roughly equivalent, while chickenshit means cowardly, batshit indicates a person is crazy, and going apeshit indicates a person is entering a state of unbridled rage.). Are you shitting me!? is a question sometimes given in response to an incredible assertion. An answer that reasserts the veracity of the claim is, I shit you not. 

 Shit can also be used as a comparative noun; for instance, This show is funny as shit (shite in Scotland, Northern England and Lincolnshire), or This test is hard as shit(or shite), or That was stupid as shit(e). For the third example here, stupid can be replaced with a synonym such as dumb or idiotic, although idiotic is uncommonly used and would sound out of place in this phrase. These three usages (with funny, hard, and stupid or another synonym of stupid) are heard most commonly in the United States. Note that shit is both a positive and negative thing in these examples, shit being apparently very funny (a positive thing) and in the second and third examples very hard (as in, difficult- a negative thing to be) or very stupid. Note also that in a p