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A Rose By Any Other Name...

I was walking home from the grocery store yesterday and a flight of urban pigeons caught my eye as they flew toward me. As usual, a couple of them were flying precariously low, so that as they came closer I instinctively ducked. When this happens I'm not near as concerned that a pigeon is going to collide with me as I am that one is going to shit on me. It's happened.

Anyway, all of this got me to thinking about...err...shit!

I know this isn't an attractive topic for the old blog, but think about it -- for something as useless as shit, the human race has come up with a lot of words for it. They say Inuits have 100 different words to describe snow. I decided to see how many words came to mind to mean shit. Here goes:

shit
crap
caca
dung
cowpie (specialized)
manure
spoor
droppings
guano
excrement
turd
feces
scat
ordure

That's about all that I can some up with. 14. That's 14 words to describe something that's useful for two things, fertilizer and medical diagnoses. Is this one of the reasons that people from Japan tell me that English is a hard language to learn?

Comments

Anonymous said…
Dump, log, yule tide log, captain's log, soft serve, movement, poop, #2
September 14, 2008 at 11:00 AM
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