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How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art Book Excerpt |
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(from Author's
Note)
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For several years, How to Shit in the
Woods lay dormant, a collection of scattered ideas on scraps of lined
yellow paper tucked in a drawer, while I grappled with a seemingly insurmountable
problem: terminology. How was I to refer to this stuff that is
pushed and squirted out of the body in response to eating and drinking? Since the days of Adam, men have been announcing they were going off to take a piss, leak, dump, or crap. Although references to the subject do not abound in history, conjecture would have Eve and her female descendants declaring the same, until those allegedly delicate-of-heart, weak-of-stomach Victorian ladies began dropping over at the sound of “such language.” Daintiness and propriety contracted an allergy to the foregoing diction, which is considered odious to this day. Yet, at some point, I suspect, cultural fashion will dictate another back-to-basics movement and relieve this parlance, currently deemed macho, of its inelegance. Loathing most things fashionable and having at one time worked with street kids, I confess that my own language can quite easily become delightfully raw and debased. I salute macho in this instance, in the interest of directness. Still, I was reluctant to begin a book by offending most readers, education—not alienation—being the goal in mind. The process by which I resolved this semantic difficulty is worth sharing. In everyday speech, around everyday friends, I admit, I gravitate to the words shit and pee. Running through all the alternatives produced no sound solutions. Studding an entire book with urination, defecation, elimination, and stools seemed depressingly clinical. The pronunciation alone of the terms bowel movement or BM seems to emit something foul—and from my childhood, I remember them being breathed in whispers. Bathroom and restroom are euphemisms not applicable in the woods; even outhouse and Porta Potti do not fit where they do not exist. Scats, turds, dung, chips, pellets, and pies are useful mainly in zoology and dirty jokes. Constitutional seems overly prissy, in addition to being misleading, as I've never heard of anything but a “morning” constitutional, easily confused with a brisk turn in the fresh air. John, johnny, head, potty, wee-wee, pee-pee, whiz, Number One and Number Two, tinkle, poop, load, poo-poo, doo-doo, ca-ca, and “going to see a man about a horse”—all a little indirect or too cutesy. Next, I tried to circumvent the problem by relying on description, avoiding terms in the particular altogether. But the prose became lengthy and cumbersome; plus, I was certain I'd be accused of not calling a crap, a crap. There I was, stuck again, and not another noun in sight. My mind began slowly wandering back over the tangle of verbiage looking for a new trail, something missed. I remembered my father had always purported to be within his genteel rights in using the word piss because Shakespeare had employed it. Father's strategy seemed excellent (though he was technically wrong; it was Jonathan Swift), and over the years, my refined (verging on priggish) mother did grow, if reluctantly, to accept this argument. Though she never came to use the word herself, in time, the wince that wrinkled-up her face upon its utterance became almost indiscernible. Thus, with a solid case in point and mother's brief but significant evolution in mind, I felt a defensible logic begin to take hold. The printed word has a way of inventing truths (as the success of several sleazy national tabloids attests) and of influencing accepted usage, with Webster's Dictionary considered a most reliable reference. A great excitement seized me as I noted that, although my 1957 unabridged edition of Webster's contained no mention of shit, the library's 1988 edition did include the term, plus a three-line definition. Aha! Linguistic history in the making. Next, I remembered something E. B. White had written about language that had stuck in my mind, no doubt because of his choice of metaphor—rivers being close to my heart. |
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| Shit hadn't been lost in any backwater. White, were he alive today, might well be horrified by my employing his explanation for my justification, but, unwittingly and to my great joy, I found he supplied more and more defense for my crystallizing rationale: | ||
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| By no means had
shit grown stale. For hundreds of years shit had survived
with ease. I knew it to be an old word: I'd seen it as scitian in
Old English, as shyte in Middle English. Currently, shit abounds
in daily conversation. But with Webster's still proclaiming its usage
as “vulgar,” I concluded the word was lolling in its infancy.
With the needed precedent set in 1988, I fell right into keeping with father's old strategy. My lacking the literary stature of a Shakespeare or Jonathan Swift became no matter. Feeling as exuberant as one of E. B. White's thousand burbling tributaries, I proposed to help wash this basic, baldfaced word, shit, downstream to its confluence with greater maturity and on into the ocean of accepted usage. There, it might float around in the company of all other words deemed proper for composition. And so it was that I comfortably settled on the terminology of shit (and pee along with it), accompanied by splashes of the clinical and cutesy in appropriate places. Shit is a superb word, really. Sometimes shit falls as music on my ears. It doesn't have to be spoken in hushed, moralizing tones. SHIT! OH, SHeeeit! A versatile, articulative, and colorful word, it is indeed a pleasure to shout, to roll along one's tongue. A perfectly audible—if not ear-shattering—remarkably ordinary, decent, modest everyday word. Furthermore, it is my thought that in legitimately defining shit, I might engender some small credibility for the word with anyone still shocked by its usage. Pee seems unnecessary to define here, since, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it is already a euphemism for piss. It is also a familiar and cultured sound: we have P's and peas and appease. For the too well-bred then and the overly delicate, for the betterment of the English language, and perhaps for the next edition of Webster's, I offer at the end of the text (it is for the reader to decide whether shamelessly) a complete, unabridged definition of shit. For all its subtleties of meaning this word is extremely unambiguous. Shit, in fact, is one of the least misunderstood words in use today. |
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