George Yule considers the finer points of vague language When asked by the Editor if I might be willing to contribute a piece to The Clarion, I checked my Kundera persona and, finding it sound asleep, apologetically replied that I just couldn't think of anything to write about. It was an unusual topic to give me, though, as it turned out, I had actually been thinking about crap for some time. My concern hadn't been with the usual crap, the kind that for some reason is inevitably absent from language teaching materials, no matter how authentic they might claim to be. We might assume that there must be some conspiracy among the gatekeepers of print to avoid any of that kind of crap, perhaps because they just want to keep things nice and clean. But their role in the conspiracy, if such a sinister term is even appropriate, is surely peripheral.
Publishers probably avoid crap because nobody wants it.
Asking why nobody wants it may be a better way to uncover the real conspiracy. But that wasn't the kind of crap I'd been thinking about. This kind of crap filled a syntactic slot that, on other occasions, was occupied by junk, mess, nonsense, shit, stuff, and things. I hit people, I get hit by people, that kind of shit. These two examples are public domain instances, but such forms appear with much greater frequency in everyday conversation.