121-460: Bollocks ( / ˈ b ɒ l ə k s / ) is a word of Middle English origin meaning " testicles ". The word is often used in British English and Irish English in a multitude of negative ways; it most commonly appears as a noun meaning "rubbish" or " nonsense ", an expletive following a minor accident or misfortune, or an adjective to describe something that is of poor quality or useless. It
242-408: A shit-eating grin means the person wearing it may be displaying self-satisfaction, smugness, embarrassment, or mischief. It may also be a playful evasion, as a response to the query "I'll bet you drank the whole bottle of booze yourself, didn't you?" The expression no shit? (a contraction of no bullshit? ) is used in response to a statement that is extraordinary or hard to believe. Alternatively
363-456: A bollocks out of it", and it is generally used throughout Britain and Ireland . To bollocks something up means "to mess something up". It refers to a botched job: "Well, you bollocksed it up that time, Your Majesty!" or " Bollocksed up at work again, I fear. Millions down the drain". To "drop a bollock" describes the malfunction of an operation, or messing something up, as in many sports, and in more polite business parlance, dropping
484-505: A pejorative for a menial worker or other low class person. `within the world of (ii) a performer or fan of country-and-western music. The term shitkicker may be substituted with the less vulgar "chipkicker", as in Lyle Lovett 's song "Give back my heart" on Pontiac , where a girl in a "cowboy-looking bar" is described as a "chipkicker-redneck woman". The word shithead is a commonly heard insult. A shithead may also be referred to as
605-420: A shit-for-brains . Another word for a spectacularly stupid (or contemptible) person is dipshit . Shithead is also the name of a card game. In North American slang, prefixing the article the to shit gives it a completely opposite definition, meaning the best , as in, for example " Altered Beast is the shit". Other slang words of the same meaning, such as crap , are not used in such locutions. To wear
726-511: A bollocking to someone; in the building trade one can 'throw a right bollocking into' someone. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the earliest meaning as "to slander or defame" and suggests that it entered the English language from the 1653 translation of one of Rabelais ' works, which includes the Middle French expression "en couilletant", translated as "ballocking". The earliest printed use in
847-506: A character named Bolloxinion, King of Sodom (along with other characters with names such as General Buggeranthos and the maid of honour, Fuckadilla). The word bollox appears several times in the text, such as: Had all mankind, whose pintles I adore, With well fill'd bollox swiv'd me o'er and o'er. None could in nature have oblig'd me more. In 1690, the publisher Benjamin Crayle was fined 20 pounds and sent to prison for his part in publishing
968-567: A clergyman, although this meaning is not mentioned by the OED ' s 1989 edition. For example, in 1684, the Commanding Officer of the Straits Fleet regularly referred to his chaplain as " Ballocks ". It has been suggested that bollocks came to have its modern meaning of " nonsense " because some clergymen were notorious for talking nonsense during their sermons. Originally, the word "bollocks"
1089-468: A crock!" The phrase built like a brick shithouse is used in the United States to compliment a curvaceous woman, but in other English-speaking countries to compliment men with athletic physiques. This meaning originates from the observation that most shithouses are rather ramshackle affairs constructed of plywood or scrap sheets of steel. The shitter is a slang term for a toilet, and can be used like
1210-732: A demonstrative ( þis , þat ), after a possessive pronoun (e.g., hir , our ), or with a name or in a form of address. This derives from the Old English "weak" declension of adjectives. This inflexion continued to be used in writing even after final -e had ceased to be pronounced. In earlier texts, multisyllable adjectives also receive a final -e in these situations, but this occurs less regularly in later Middle English texts. Otherwise, adjectives have no ending and adjectives already ending in -e etymologically receive no ending as well. Earlier texts sometimes inflect adjectives for case as well. Layamon's Brut inflects adjectives for
1331-474: A derivative of Teutonic ball- , of which the Old English representative would be inferred as beall-u , -a , or -e ". The Teutonic ball- in turn probably derives from the Proto-Indo-European base *bhel- , to inflate or swell. This base also forms the root of many other words, including " phallus ". From the 17th to the 19th century, bollocks or ballocks was allegedly used as a slang term for
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#17328510738001452-803: A dialect of Old French , now known as Old Norman , which developed in England into Anglo-Norman . The use of Norman as the preferred language of literature and polite discourse fundamentally altered the role of Old English in education and administration, even though many Normans of this period were illiterate and depended on the clergy for written communication and record-keeping. A significant number of Norman words were borrowed into English and used alongside native Germanic words with similar meanings. Examples of Norman/Germanic pairs in Modern English include pig and pork , calf and veal , wood and forest , and freedom and liberty . The role of Anglo-Norman as
1573-493: A largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (with many Norse borrowings in the northern parts of the country) but a greatly simplified inflectional system. The grammatical relations that were expressed in Old English by the dative and instrumental cases were replaced in Early Middle English with prepositional constructions. The Old English genitive - es survives in the -'s of the modern English possessive , but most of
1694-486: A lengthened – and later also modified – pronunciation of a preceding vowel. For example, in name , originally pronounced as two syllables, the /a/ in the first syllable (originally an open syllable) lengthened, the final weak vowel was later dropped, and the remaining long vowel was modified in the Great Vowel Shift (for these sound changes, see Phonology , above). The final ⟨e⟩ , now silent, thus became
1815-488: A lesser extent), and, therefore, it cannot be attributed simply to the influence of French-speaking sections of the population: English did, after all, remain the vernacular . It is also argued that Norse immigrants to England had a great impact on the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English. One argument is that, although Norse and English speakers were somewhat comprehensible to each other due to similar morphology,
1936-462: A metaphor suggesting that trouble for a manager may be transferred to the subordinates. There are a number of anecdotes and jokes about such situations, as the imagery of these situations is considered to be funny. This is generally tied-in with the concept that disgusting and messy substances spilled onto someone else are humorous. For someone to be described as shitfaced means that person is essentially incapacitated by alcoholic intoxication (i.e. in
2057-486: A more analytic language with a stricter word order. Both Old English and Old Norse were synthetic languages with complicated inflections. Communication between Vikings in the Danelaw and their Anglo-Saxon neighbours resulted in the erosion of inflection in both languages. Old Norse may have had a more profound impact on Middle and Modern English development than any other language. The effect of Old Norse on Old English
2178-429: A paper called "Delete Expletives?". This placed "bollocks" in eighth position in terms of its perceived severity, between " prick " (seventh place) and " arsehole " (ninth place). By comparison, the word "balls" (which has some similar meanings) was down in 22nd place. Of the people surveyed, 25% thought that "bollocks" should not be broadcast at all, and only 11% thought that it could acceptably be broadcast at times before
2299-580: A particularly loathsome individual, or an object that is of poor quality ("this car is a piece of shit ", often abbreviated to "P.O.S."). One study published in 2017 argued that "shit studies" is a cross-disciplinary meta-field of rhetorical inquiry about human communication and reasoning. The authors explained, "rhetorical studies has theorized 'shit' in terms of the communication of transformation, style, and textual relations," particularly in relation to claims of expertise to topics such as "anti-semitism" and "wine-tasting." They conclude that bullshit speech
2420-419: A person who either overestimates his own worth or ability, or is highly estimated by others ("He thinks he's some hot shit!" or "He's one hot shit!"). In polite company the euphemism hotshot may be substituted when referring to a person. A speaker may show dominance through arrogance using the phrase His shit don't stink . Its grammatical incorrectness highlights the self-importance of the referent relative to
2541-473: A piece of shit would imply irony and would therefore undermine the strength of the statement. The phrase "(I don't) give a shit" can be used when one does not care about something, or has a passive attitude toward said thing, as it denotes indifference . In context, one can say: "You're offended? Well, I don't give a shit!" or "You're telling me? Go find somebody who gives a shit." President Richard Nixon said to aide H.R. Haldeman while being tape recorded in
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#17328510738002662-458: A politician comes to Nottingham and speaks here to a group of people in the city centre and during his speech a heckler replies "bollocks". Are we to expect this person to be incarcerated, or do we live in a country where we are proud of our Anglo-Saxon language? Do we wish our language to be virile and strong or watered down and weak? Tony Wright, a Leicestershire trader, was given an £80 fixed penalty fine by police for selling T-shirts bearing
2783-515: A process called apophony ), as in Modern English. With the discontinuation of the Late West Saxon standard used for the writing of Old English in the period prior to the Norman Conquest, Middle English came to be written in a wide variety of scribal forms, reflecting different regional dialects and orthographic conventions. Later in the Middle English period, however, and particularly with
2904-604: A pub-style café named "The dog's bollocks". The phrase "chuffed to one's bollocks" describes someone who is very pleased with themselves. Nobel laureate Harold Pinter used this in The Homecoming . The phrase provided a serious challenge to translators of his work. Pinter used a similar phrase in an open letter , published in The Guardian , and addressed to Prime Minister Tony Blair, attacking his co-operation with American foreign policy . The letter ends by saying "Oh, by
3025-468: A sigh or a shrug, but can be spoken derisively to someone who complains too often about his ill fortunes, or in an irritating manner. When the shit hits the fan is usually used to refer to a specific time of confrontation or trouble, which requires decisive action. This is often used in reference to combat situations and the action scenes in movies, but can also be used for everyday instances that one might be apprehensive about. I don't want to be here when
3146-561: A standard based on the London dialects (Chancery Standard) had become established. This largely formed the basis for Modern English spelling, although pronunciation has changed considerably since that time. Middle English was succeeded in England by Early Modern English , which lasted until about 1650. Scots developed concurrently from a variant of the Northumbrian dialect (prevalent in northern England and spoken in southeast Scotland ). During
3267-399: A state of high excitement or 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 . Perhaps the only constant connotation that shit reliably carries is that its referent holds some degree of emotional intensity for the speaker. Whether offense is taken at hearing
3388-523: A thoroughly drunken state). Shit can comfortably stand in for the terms bad and anything in many instances ( Dinner was good, but the movie was shit. You're all mad at me, but I didn't do shit! ). A comparison can also be used, as in Those pants look like shit , or This stuff tastes like shit . Many usages are idiomatic . I'm shit out of luck usually refers to someone who is at the end of their wits or who has no remaining viable options. In polite company
3509-488: A way of expressing to someone that they need to stop complaining about something and cope with it instead (Billy: I got arrested because of you! Tommy: Tough shit, dude, you knew you might get arrested when you chose to come with me. ) Note that in this case, as in many cases with the term, tough shit is often said as a way of pointing out someone's fault in his/her own current problem. It's also common to express annoyance by simply saying Shit . A shitload of something
3630-420: Is eat shit! (cf coprophagy ) expressing contempt. Some other personal word may be added such as eat my shit implying truly personal connotations. As an aside, the above is actually a contraction of the phrase eat shit and die! . It is often said without commas as a curse; they command the other party to perform exactly those actions in that order. However, the term was originally Eat, Shit, and Die naming
3751-409: Is "I told Maurice that he was talking bollocks, that he was full of shit and that his opinions were a pile of piss. (Rhetoric was always my indulgence.)" "Talking bollocks " in a corporate context is referred to as bollockspeak . Bollockspeak tends to be buzzword -laden and largely content-free, like gobbledygook : "Rupert, we'll have to leverage our synergies to facilitate a paradigm shift by Q4"
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3872-463: Is a common variant in British and Irish English . As a slang term, shit has many meanings, including: nonsense, foolishness, something of little value or quality, trivial and usually boastful or inaccurate talk or a contemptible person. It could also be used to refer to any other noun in general or as an expression of annoyance, surprise or anger. The word is likely derived from Old English , having
3993-441: Is a large quantity, especially something unpleasant or disgusting. The boss dumped a shitload of extra work for me this week. A shit sandwich is something (like a situation or state of affairs) unpleasant made triflingly more palatable by packaging it in things less unpleasant, as rotten meat sandwiched in bread. The term shit sandwich originates from an old joke that goes: "Life is a shit sandwich. The more bread (money) you got,
4114-568: Is a recent term (the Online Etymology Dictionary dates it to 1989,) its origins are obscure. Etymologist Eric Partridge and the Oxford English Dictionary believe the term comes from the now obsolete typographical sequence of a colon and a dash :-. This typography, using a dash following a colon -:, was used to introduce a list. Thus, it is a very early example of an emoticon . The Oxford English Dictionary says
4235-505: Is also used in common phrases like "bollocks to this", which is said when quitting a task or job that is too difficult or negative, and "that's a load of old bollocks", which generally indicates contempt for a certain subject or opinion. Conversely, the word also appears in positive phrases such as "the dog's bollocks" or more simply "the bollocks", which will refer to something which is admired or well-respected. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives examples of its usage dating back to
4356-425: Is an example of management bollockspeak . There is a whole parodic book entitled The Little Book of Management Bollocks . When a great deal of bollocks is being spoken, it may be said that the 'bollocks quotient' is high. Comparable to cock-up , screw -up , balls-up , fuck-up etc. Used with the indefinite article , it means a disaster, a mess or a failure . It is often used pejoratively, as in to have "made
4477-418: Is considered profanity and is usually avoided in formal speech. Minced oath substitutes for the word shit in English include shoot , shucks , sugar , and the euphemistic backronym , Sugar, Honey, Ice(d) Tea . 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
4598-447: Is in a lot of shit or deep shit (a common euphemism is deep doo-doo ). A shitstorm would be quite a lot of trouble happening all in one place at one time. It's common for someone to refer to an unpleasant thing as hard shit ( You got a speeding ticket? Man, that's some hard shit ), but the phrase tough shit is used as an unsympathetic way of saying too bad to whoever is having problems ( You got arrested? Tough shit, man! ) or as
4719-433: Is now rare and used only in oxen and as part of a double plural , in children and brethren . Some dialects still have forms such as eyen (for eyes ), shoon (for shoes ), hosen (for hose(s) ), kine (for cows ), and been (for bees ). Grammatical gender survived to a limited extent in early Middle English before being replaced by natural gender in the course of the Middle English period. Grammatical gender
4840-402: Is often used as an exclamation to charge someone who is believed to be prone to dishonesty, exaggeration or is thought to be "phoney" with an accusation. For example: 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
4961-454: Is one-sided discourse that is difficult to penetrate because it contains "ideological barriers to the expectation of mutuality," working to deflect critical responses. Shit can be used as a generic mass noun similar to stuff ; for instance, This show is funny (as) shit or This test is hard (as) shit , or That was stupid shit . These three usages (with funny , hard , and stupid or another synonym of stupid ) are heard most commonly in
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5082-417: Is simple enough, as the actual substance striking the rotating blades of a fan would cause a messy and unpleasant situation (much like being in the presence of a manure spreader ). Whether or not this has actually happened, or if the concept is simply feasible enough for most people to imagine the result without needing it to be demonstrated, is unknown. Another example might be the saying shit rolls downhill ,
5203-529: Is sometimes a shit or a piece of shit ; and to defecate is to shit or 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. When uttered as an exclamation or interjection , shit may convey astonishment or a feeling of being favorably impressed or disgusted. Similar utterances might be damn! , wow! or yuck! . Piece of shit may also be used figuratively to describe
5324-502: Is sometimes used to describe a person who inspires displeasure or disgust, as in: "You're lower than whale shit at the bottom of the ocean!" “You can’t polish shit” is a popular aphorism roughly equivalent to "putting Lipstick on a pig " (although "a turd" is more commonly used). However, the TV show Mythbusters showed you can, in fact, polish a turd. Shit can also be used to establish social superiority over someone else. The most common gibe
5445-587: Is to dismiss or dispose of casually or unceremoniously, as into a waste basket. Shitcan can also be used as a noun: Don't bother; a report like this is gonna go directly into the shitcan. It can also refer to being fired from a job: "The boss is gonna shitcan you if you keep showing up late." The backronym form "S.H.I.T." often figures into jokes, like Special High Intensity Training (a well-known joke used in job applications), Special Hot Interdiction Team (a mockery on SWAT ), any college name that begins with an S-H (like South Harmon Institute of Technology in
5566-435: Is to work very hard. This phrase is also sometimes used by or about women: Boy George referred to his mother "working her bollocks off" at home. " Bollock naked " is used in the singular form to emphasise being completely nude: "he was completely pissed and stark bollock naked ". In Ireland, "bollocks" , "ballocks" or "bollox" can be used as a singular noun to mean a despicable or notorious person, for instance: "Who's
5687-600: The Early Modern English and Modern English eras. Middle English generally did not have silent letters . For example, knight was pronounced [ˈkniçt] (with both the ⟨k⟩ and the ⟨gh⟩ pronounced, the latter sounding as the ⟨ch⟩ in German Knecht ). The major exception was the silent ⟨e⟩ – originally pronounced but lost in normal speech by Chaucer's time. This letter, however, came to indicate
5808-939: The Liberal Democrats , hoping to stop the UK's departure from the European Union have adopted the slogan, " Bollocks to Brexit ". When queried about the propriety of the use of this term in Parliament in January 2019, the Speaker of the House, John Bercow ruled that the use of the word in Parliamentary speech was "not disorderly". "Talking bollocks " generally means talking nonsense or bullshit , for example: "Don't listen to him, he's talking bollocks ", or "talking absolute bollocks ". Another example
5929-573: The Norman Conquest , had normally been written in French. Like Chaucer's work, this new standard was based on the East Midlands-influenced speech of London. Clerks using this standard were usually familiar with French and Latin , influencing the forms they chose. The Chancery Standard, which was adopted slowly, was used in England by bureaucrats for most official purposes, excluding those of
6050-688: The Northern England (corresponding to the Scandinavian Kingdom of Jórvík ), the East Midlands and the East of England , words in the spoken language emerged in the 10th and 11th centuries near the transition from Old to Middle English. Influence on the written languages only appeared from the beginning of the 13th century, this delay in Scandinavian lexical influence in English has been attributed to
6171-745: The Oval Office , "I don't give a shit about the lira." He meant he was too busy managing the Watergate affair to consider a crisis in the Italian monetary system. The shit list is a category of people who are in ill favor with some individual or group of people, perhaps as the managers of a company, and likely to be the targets of special treatment. The phrase "take shit" means to receive bad or frivolous treatment from someone. Such an abused person might say "I'm not taking any more of your shit!" to indicate that they will no longer tolerate such treatment. Whale shit
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#17328510738006292-621: The 12th century, incorporating a unique phonetic spelling system; and the Ancrene Wisse and the Katherine Group , religious texts written for anchoresses , apparently in the West Midlands in the early 13th century. The language found in the last two works is sometimes called the AB language . Additional literary sources of the 12th and 13th centuries include Layamon's Brut and The Owl and
6413-422: The 13th century and was replaced by thorn. Thorn mostly fell out of use during the 14th century and was replaced by ⟨th⟩ . Anachronistic usage of the scribal abbreviation [REDACTED] ( þe , "the") has led to the modern mispronunciation of thorn as ⟨ y ⟩ in this context; see ye olde . Wynn, which represented the phoneme /w/ , was replaced by ⟨ w ⟩ during
6534-409: The 13th century. Due to its similarity to the letter ⟨p⟩ , it is mostly represented by ⟨w⟩ in modern editions of Old and Middle English texts even when the manuscript has wynn. Under Norman influence, the continental Carolingian minuscule replaced the insular script that had been used for Old English. However, because of the significant difference in appearance between
6655-503: The 13th century. One of the early references is Wycliffe's Bible (1382), Leviticus xxii, 24: "Al beeste, that ... kitt and taken awey the ballokes is, ye shulen not offre to the Lord ;..." (any beast that is cut and taken away the bollocks , you shall not offer to the Lord, i.e. castrated animals are not suitable as sacrifices). The OED states (with abbreviations expanded): "Probably
6776-516: The 14th century, even after the loss of the majority of the continental possessions of the English monarchy . In the aftermath of the Black Death of the 14th century, there was significant migration into London , of people to the counties of the southeast of England and from the east and central Midlands of England, and a new prestige London dialect began to develop as a result of this clash of
6897-650: The 1540s after the printing and wide distribution of the English Bible and Prayer Book , which made the new standard of English publicly recognizable and lasted until about 1650. The main changes between the Old English sound system and that of Middle English include: The combination of the last three processes listed above led to the spelling conventions associated with silent ⟨e⟩ and doubled consonants (see under Orthography , below). Middle English retains only two distinct noun-ending patterns from
7018-568: The Church and legalities, which used Latin and Law French respectively. The Chancery Standard's influence on later forms of written English is disputed, but it did undoubtedly provide the core around which Early Modern English formed. Early Modern English emerged with the help of William Caxton 's printing press, developed during the 1470s. The press stabilized English through a push towards standardization, led by Chancery Standard enthusiast and writer Richard Pynson . Early Modern English began in
7139-564: The Danelaw, this endings tended gradually to become obscured and finally lost, "simplifying English grammar" in the process. In time, the inflections melted away and the analytic pattern emerged. Viking influence on Old English is most apparent in pronouns , modals, comparatives, pronominal adverbs (like hence and together ), conjunctions, and prepositions show the most marked Danish influence. The best evidence of Scandinavian influence appears in extensive word borrowings; however, texts from
7260-418: The Middle English period varied widely. Examples of writing from this period that have survived show extensive regional variation. The more standardized Old English literary variety broke down and writing in English became fragmented and localized and was, for the most part, being improvised. By the end of the period (about 1470), and aided by the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in 1439,
7381-675: The Middle English period, many Old English grammatical features either became simplified or disappeared altogether. Noun, adjective, and verb inflections were simplified by the reduction (and eventual elimination) of most grammatical case distinctions. Middle English also saw considerable adoption of Anglo-Norman vocabulary, especially in the areas of politics, law, the arts, and religion, as well as poetic and emotive diction. Conventional English vocabulary remained primarily Germanic in its sources, with Old Norse influences becoming more apparent. Significant changes in pronunciation took place, particularly involving long vowels and diphthongs, which in
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#17328510738007502-545: The Nightingale . Some scholars have defined "Early Middle English" as encompassing English texts up to 1350. This longer time frame would extend the corpus to include many Middle English Romances (especially those of the Auchinleck manuscript c. 1330 ). Gradually, the wealthy and the government Anglicised again, although Norman (and subsequently French ) remained the dominant language of literature and law until
7623-619: The Norse speakers' inability to reproduce the ending sounds of English words influenced Middle English's loss of inflectional endings. Important texts for the reconstruction of the evolution of Middle English out of Old English are the Peterborough Chronicle , which continued to be compiled up to 1154; the Ormulum , a biblical commentary probably composed in Lincolnshire in the second half of
7744-544: The Old English -eþ , Midland dialects showing -en from about 1200, and Northern forms using -es in the third person singular as well as the plural. The past tense of weak verbs was formed by adding an -ed(e) , -d(e) , or -t(e) ending. The past-tense forms, without their personal endings, also served as past participles with past-participle prefixes derived from Old English: i- , y- , and sometimes bi- . Strong verbs , by contrast, formed their past tense by changing their stem vowel (e.g., binden became bound ,
7865-448: The United States. Using "as" denotes a subtle change in the meaning of the expression; however, the overall intent is basically the same. In the expression Get your shit together! , the word shit can refer either to one's wits or composure or to one's things, gear, etc. He doesn't have his shit together means that his affairs are disordered, reflecting not bad luck or forces beyond his control, but his personal shortcomings. To shoot
7986-426: The acronym SOL is commonly substituted for this. That little shit shot me in the ass , suggests a mischievous or contemptuous person. Euphemisms such as crap are not usually used in this context. The exclamations oh shit! and aw shit! are used to express displeasure or embarrassment (sometimes facetiously) with oneself when one makes a mistake, especially a stupid or avoidable mistake. When used to comment on
8107-624: The actions of someone else, they can take on a more humorous quality if the mistake does not result in serious consequences. Oh shit! is also a reflexive expression of horror or terror, as when witnessing or being involved in a life-threatening situation (for example, a vehicle accident). The term piece of shit is generally used to classify a product or service as being sufficiently below the writer's understanding of generally accepted quality standards to be of negligible and perhaps even negative value. The term piece of shit has greater precision than shit or shitty in that piece of shit identifies
8228-416: The ball brings play to an unscheduled halt. A "bollocking" usually denotes a robust verbal chastisement for something which one has done (or not done, as the case may be), for instance: "I didn't do my homework and got a right bollocking off Mr Smith", or "A nurse was assisting at an appendix operation when she shouldn't have been ... and the surgeon got a bollocking ". Actively, one gives or delivers
8349-507: The comparative and superlative (e.g., greet , great; gretter , greater). Adjectives ending in -ly or -lich formed comparatives either with -lier , -liest or -loker , -lokest . A few adjectives also displayed Germanic umlaut in their comparatives and superlatives, such as long , lenger . Other irregular forms were mostly the same as in modern English. Middle English personal pronouns were mostly developed from those of Old English , with
8470-478: The development of the Chancery Standard in the 15th century, orthography became relatively standardised in a form based on the East Midlands-influenced speech of London. Spelling at the time was mostly quite regular . (There was a fairly consistent correspondence between letters and sounds.) The irregularity of present-day English orthography is largely due to pronunciation changes that have taken place over
8591-488: The different dialects, that was based chiefly on the speech of the East Midlands but also influenced by that of other regions. The writing of this period, however, continues to reflect a variety of regional forms of English. The Ayenbite of Inwyt , a translation of a French confessional prose work, completed in 1340, is written in a Kentish dialect . The best known writer of Middle English, Geoffrey Chaucer , wrote in
8712-531: The double consonant represented a sound that was (or had previously been) geminated (i.e., had genuinely been "doubled" and would thus have regularly blocked the lengthening of the preceding vowel). In other cases, by analogy, the consonant was written double merely to indicate the lack of lengthening. The basic Old English Latin alphabet consisted of 20 standard letters plus four additional letters: ash ⟨æ⟩ , eth ⟨ð⟩ , thorn ⟨þ⟩ , and wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ . There
8833-468: The end of the Middle English period only the strong -'s ending (variously spelled) was in use. Some formerly feminine nouns, as well as some weak nouns, continued to make their genitive forms with -e or no ending (e.g., fole hoves , horses' hooves), and nouns of relationship ending in -er frequently have no genitive ending (e.g., fader bone , "father's bane"). The strong -(e)s plural form has survived into Modern English. The weak -(e)n form
8954-418: The exception of the third person plural, a borrowing from Old Norse (the original Old English form clashed with the third person singular and was eventually dropped). Also, the nominative form of the feminine third person singular was replaced by a form of the demonstrative that developed into sche (modern she ), but the alternative heyr remained in some areas for a long time. As with nouns, there
9075-594: The following mark (":— ") is entitled "the dog’s bollocks", defined as: "typogr. a colon followed by a dash, regarded as forming a shape resembling the male sexual organs." The usage is cited to the year 1949. This phrase has found its way into popular culture in a number of ways. There is a beer brewed in England by the Wychwood Brewery called the Dog's Bollocks, as well as a lager cocktail . The Dutch city Groningen has
9196-412: The indicator of the longer and changed pronunciation of ⟨a⟩ . In fact, vowels could have this lengthened and modified pronunciation in various positions, particularly before a single consonant letter and another vowel or before certain pairs of consonants. A related convention involved the doubling of consonant letters to show that the preceding vowel was not to be lengthened. In some cases,
9317-406: The karate match! The term to shit-talk connotes bragging or exaggeration (whereas to talk shit primarily means to gossip [about someone in a damaging way] or to talk in a boastful way about things which are erroneous in nature), but in such constructions as the above, the word shit often functions as an interjection . The exclamation holy shit derives its force from the juxtaposition of
9438-565: The lack of written evidence from the areas of Danish control, as the majority of written sources from Old English were produced in the West Saxon dialect spoken in Wessex , the heart of Anglo-Saxon political power at the time. The Norman Conquest of England in 1066 saw the replacement of the top levels of the English-speaking political and ecclesiastical hierarchies by Norman rulers who spoke
9559-760: The language of government and law can be seen in the abundance of Modern English words for the mechanisms of government that are derived from Anglo-Norman, such as court , judge , jury , appeal , and parliament . There are also many Norman-derived terms relating to the chivalric cultures that arose in the 12th century, an era of feudalism , seigneurialism , and crusading . Words were often taken from Latin, usually through French transmission. This gave rise to various synonyms, including kingly (inherited from Old English), royal (from French, inherited from Vulgar Latin), and regal (from French, which borrowed it from Classical Latin). Later French appropriations were derived from standard, rather than Norman, French. Examples of
9680-603: The late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English period. Scholarly opinion varies, but the University of Valencia states the period when Middle English was spoken as being from 1150 to 1500. This stage of the development of the English language roughly coincided with the High and Late Middle Ages . Middle English saw significant changes to its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and orthography . Writing conventions during
9801-403: The later Middle English period began to undergo the Great Vowel Shift . Little survives of early Middle English literature , due in part to Norman domination and the prestige that came with writing in French rather than English. During the 14th century, a new style of literature emerged with the works of writers including John Wycliffe and Geoffrey Chaucer , whose Canterbury Tales remains
9922-416: The less shit you have to eat." Up shit creek or especially Up shit creek without a paddle describes a situation in which one is in severe difficulties with no apparent means of solution (this is simply a profane version of the older saying "up the creek without a paddle", profanity added for emphasis or humor). Shit happens means that bad happenings in life are inevitable. This is usually spoken with
10043-434: The low quality of a specific component or output of a process without applying a derogatory slant to the entire process. For example, if one said "The youth orchestra has been a remarkably successful initiative. The fact that the orchestra's recent rendition of Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony in B minor was pretty much a piece of shit should not in any way detract from this." The substitution of shit or shitty for pretty much
10164-444: The maker of the hard-to-believe statement may add no shit to reinforce the sincerity or truthfulness of their statement, particularly in response to someone expressing disbelief at their statement. No shit is also used sarcastically in response to a statement of the obvious, as in no shit, Sherlock . In this form the word can also be used in phrases such as don't give me that shit or you're full of shit . The term full of shit
10285-417: The masculine accusative, genitive, and dative, the feminine dative, and the plural genitive. The Owl and the Nightingale adds a final -e to all adjectives not in the nominative, here only inflecting adjectives in the weak declension (as described above). Comparatives and superlatives were usually formed by adding -er and -est . Adjectives with long vowels sometimes shortened these vowels in
10406-427: The more complex system of inflection in Old English : Nouns of the weak declension are primarily inherited from Old English n -stem nouns but also from ō -stem, wō -stem, and u -stem nouns, which did not inflect in the same way as n -stem nouns in Old English, but joined the weak declension in Middle English. Nouns of the strong declension are inherited from the other Old English noun stem classes. Some nouns of
10527-454: The most studied and read work of the period. The transition from Late Old English to Early Middle English had taken place by the 1150s to 1180s, the period when the Augustinian canon Orrm wrote the Ormulum , one of the oldest surviving texts in Middle English. The influence of Old Norse aided the development of English from a synthetic language with relatively free word order to
10648-413: The national 9 pm " watershed " on television (radio does not have a watershed). 25% of the people regarded "bollocks" as "very severe", 32% "quite severe", 34% "mild" and 8% considered it "not swearing". A survey of the language of London teenagers (published in 2002) examined, amongst other things, the incidence of various swearwords in their speech. It noted that the top ten swearwords make up 81% of
10769-592: The nouns scite (dung, attested only in place names) and scitte (diarrhoea) and the verb scītan (to defecate, attested only in bescītan , to cover with excrement); eventually it morphed into Middle English schītte (excrement), schyt (diarrhoea) and shiten (to defecate), and it is virtually certain that it was used in some form by preliterate Germanic tribes at the time of the Roman Empire . The word may be further traced to Proto-Germanic * skit -, and ultimately to Proto-Indo-European * skheid - "cut, separate",
10890-420: The old ballocks you were talking to?" Multiple meanings, also spelled " bolloxed " or " bollixed ": The phrase "bollocksed up" means to be in a botched, bungled, confused or disarrayed state; e.g. "He managed to bollix up the whole project." In the printing and newspaper industries, dropping a California Job type case of moveable type – spilling the contents – was a classic example of "bollocksing up
11011-681: The old insular g and the Carolingian g (modern g ), the former continued in use as a separate letter, known as yogh , written ⟨ȝ⟩ . This was adopted for use to represent a variety of sounds: [ɣ], [j], [dʒ], [x], [ç] , while the Carolingian g was normally used for [g]. Instances of yogh were eventually replaced by ⟨j⟩ or ⟨y⟩ and by ⟨gh⟩ in words like night and laugh . In Middle Scots , yogh became indistinguishable from cursive z , and printers tended to use ⟨z⟩ when yogh
11132-423: The other case endings disappeared in the Early Middle English period, including most of the roughly one dozen forms of the definite article ("the"). The dual personal pronouns (denoting exactly two) also disappeared from English during this period. The loss of case endings was part of a general trend from inflections to fixed word order that also occurred in other Germanic languages (though more slowly and to
11253-510: The period in Scandinavia and Northern England do not provide certain evidence of an influence on syntax. However, at least one scholarly study of this influence shows that Old English may have been replaced entirely by Norse, by virtue of the change from Old English to Norse syntax. While the Old Norse influence was strongest in the dialects under Danish control that composed the southern part of
11374-410: The phrase ... down the toilet to suggest that something has been wasted. Example: "This CD player quit working one friggin' week after I bought it, and I lost the receipt! Twenty bucks right down the shitter!" Shit on a shingle is U.S. military slang for creamed chipped beef on toast . In polite company, this can be abbreviated as SOS . Shit can be used to denote trouble, by saying one
11495-621: The play. In one of the tales in Burton 's 1885 translation of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night , Kafur, the eunuch , says: But now my spirit is broken and my tricks are gone from me, so alas! are my ballocks. Perhaps the best-known use of the term is in the title of the 1977 punk rock album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols . Testimony in a resulting prosecution over
11616-564: The resulting doublet pairs include warden (from Norman) and guardian (from later French; both share a common ancestor loaned from Germanic). The end of Anglo-Saxon rule did not result in immediate changes to the language. The general population would have spoken the same dialects as they had before the Conquest. Once the writing of Old English came to an end, Middle English had no standard language, only dialects that evolved individually from Old English. Early Middle English (1150–1350) has
11737-460: The rhythm of the sentence. In the prologue of The Canterbury Tales , shitten is used as the past participle; however this form is not used in modern English. In American English shit as a past participle is often correct, while shat is generally acceptable and shitted is uncommon and missing from the Random House and American Heritage dictionaries. To shitcan someone or something
11858-451: The sacred with the profane. Unlike the word fuck , shit is not used emphatically with -ing or as an infix. For example; I lost the shitting karate match would be replaced with ...the fucking karate match . Similarly, while in-fucking-credible is generally acceptable, in-shitting-credible is not. The preterite and past participle of shit are attested as shat , shit , or shitted , depending on dialect and, sometimes,
11979-422: The same root believed to have become the word shed . The word has several cognates in modern Germanic languages , such as German Scheiße , Dutch schijt , Swedish skit , Icelandic skítur , Norwegian skitt etc. Ancient Greek had 'skōr' (gen. 'skatos' hence 'scato-'), from Proto-Indo-European * sker -, which is likely unrelated. The word shit (also shite in British and Hiberno-English )
12100-736: The second half of the 14th century in the emerging London dialect, although he also portrays some of his characters as speaking in northern dialects, as in " The Reeve's Tale ". In the English-speaking areas of lowland Scotland , an independent standard was developing, based on the Northumbrian dialect . This would develop into what came to be known as the Scots language . A large number of terms for abstract concepts were adopted directly from scholastic philosophical Latin (rather than via French). Examples are "absolute", "act", "demonstration", and "probable". The Chancery Standard of written English emerged c. 1430 in official documents that, since
12221-458: The second person singular in -(e)st (e.g., þou spekest , "thou speakest"), and the third person singular in -eþ (e.g., he comeþ , "he cometh/he comes"). ( þ (the letter "thorn") is pronounced like the unvoiced th in "think", but under certain circumstances, it may be like the voiced th in "that"). The following table illustrates a typical conjugation pattern: Plural forms vary strongly by dialect, with Southern dialects preserving
12342-500: The sense of a severe reprimand is, according to the OED, from 1946. Bollocking can also be used as a reinforcing adjective: "He hasn't a bollocking clue!" or "Where's me bollocking car?" "A kick in the bollocks" is used to describe a significant setback or disappointment, e.g. "I was diagnosed with having skin cancer. Ye Gods! What a kick in the bollocks". To freeze one's bollocks off means to be very cold. To "work one's bollocks off"
12463-487: The shit is to have a friendly but pointless conversation, as in "Come by my place some time and we'll shoot the shit." A shithole is any unpleasant place to be, much like a hellhole. This usage originates from a reference to a pit toilet . A crock of shit is something (a situation, explanation, argument, etc.) that is nonsense or fabricated as a deception or evasion; i.e. bullshit. Often abbreviated simply as crock . Example: "You expect me to believe that ?? What
12584-448: The shit hits the fan! indicates that the speaker is dreading this moment (which can be anything from an enemy attack to confronting an angry parent or friend). In polite society, it is often reduced to "when it hits the fan". He's the one to turn to when the shit hits the fan is an indication that the person being talked about is dependable and will not run from trouble or abandon their allies in tough situations. The concept of this phrase
12705-533: The slogan "Bollocks to Blair". This took place on 29 June 2006 at the Royal Norfolk Show; the police issued the penalty notice, quoting Section 5 of the Public Order Act 1986 which refers to language "deemed to cause harassment, alarm or distress". Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME ) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until
12826-570: The speaker; though His shit does not stink may come across as being more emphatic due to the mixed diction between its grammatical correctness and the vulgarity of shit . This phrase conveys the haughtiness of the referent and that he considers himself beyond reproach. For example: "Those pompous assholes in Finance are the ones who ruined the company – their shit don't even stink!" A variation on this theme might be: "Everything he shits smells just like roses!" The expression shitkicker can be used as
12947-409: The strong type have an -e in the nominative/accusative singular, like the weak declension, but otherwise strong endings. Often, these are the same nouns that had an -e in the nominative/accusative singular of Old English (they, in turn, were inherited from Proto-Germanic ja -stem and i -stem nouns). The distinct dative case was lost in early Middle English, and although the genitive survived, by
13068-461: The term demonstrated that in Old English , the word referred to a priest, and could also be used to mean "nonsense". Defence barrister John Mortimer QC and Virgin Records won the case: the court ruled that the word was not obscene . It just means "put aside all of that other rubbish and pay attention to this". In a summary for the defence, Mortimer asked, What sort of country are we living in if
13189-430: The three most basic things humans have to do, and it is common among soldiers . The phrase You ain't shit , expresses an air of intimidation over the addressee, expressing that they mean nothing or are worthless. Hot shit can be a reference to a matter or thing of supreme importance or urgency ("This report is really hot shit!"). It can be used in adjectival form: "This memo's shit-hot!". Hot shit can also refer to
13310-412: The total swearwords. "Bollocks" was the seventh most frequent swearword, after "fucking", " shit ", " fuck ", " bloody ", "hell" and "fuck off". Below "bollocks" were " bastard ", " bitch " and "damn", in eighth, ninth and tenth places. This research regarded these words as swearwords in the context of their usage but observed that some might be inoffensive in other contexts. Some campaigners, particularly
13431-479: The way, meant to mention, forgot to tell you, we were all chuffed to the bollocks when Labour won the election ." The 2007 Concise new Partridge dictionary of slang and unconventional English quotes " bollards " as meaning "testicles" and that it is a play on the word bollocks. The play Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery , published in 1684 and ascribed to John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester , includes
13552-464: The word varies greatly according to listener and situation, and is related to age and social class : elderly speakers and those of (or aspiring to) higher socioeconomic strata tend to use it more privately and selectively than younger and more blue-collar speakers. Like the word fuck , shit is often used to add emphasis more than to add meaning, for example, shit! I was so shit-scared of that shithead that I shit-talked him into dropping out of
13673-430: The works". The box was called "pied". "Bollocksed" in that sense meant "beyond all repair". A usage with a positive (albeit still vulgar) sense is "the dog's bollocks" or simplified "The Bollocks". An example of this usage is: "Before Tony Blair 's speech, a chap near me growled: 'He thinks he's the 'dog's bollocks'. Well, he's entitled to. It was a commanding speech: a real 'dog's bollocks' of an oration." Although this
13794-814: Was also omitted from the 1933 Oxford English Dictionary and its 1941 reprint, finally appearing in the 1972 supplement. The first modern English dictionary to include an entry for "bollocks" was G. N. Garmonsway's Penguin English Dictionary of 1965. The relative severity of the various profanities , as perceived by the British public, was studied on behalf of the Broadcasting Standards Commission , Independent Television Commission , BBC and Advertising Standards Authority . The results of this jointly commissioned research were published in December 2000 in
13915-425: Was indicated by agreement of articles and pronouns (e.g., þo ule "the feminine owl") or using the pronoun he to refer to masculine nouns such as helm ("helmet"), or phrases such as scaft stærcne (strong shaft), with the masculine accusative adjective ending -ne . Single-syllable adjectives added -e when modifying a noun in the plural and when used after the definite article ( þe ), after
14036-453: Was not available in their fonts; this led to new spellings (often giving rise to new pronunciations), as in McKenzie , where the ⟨z⟩ replaced a yogh, which had the pronunciation /j/ . Shit Shit is an English-language profanity . As a noun, it refers to fecal matter, and as a verb it means to defecate ; in the plural ("the shits"), it means diarrhea . Shite
14157-520: Was not yet a distinct j , v , or w , and Old English scribes did not generally use k , q , or z . Ash was no longer required in Middle English, as the Old English vowel /æ/ that it represented had merged into /a/ . The symbol nonetheless came to be used as a ligature for the digraph ⟨ae⟩ in many words of Greek or Latin origin, as did ⟨œ⟩ for ⟨oe⟩ . Eth and thorn both represented /θ/ or its allophone / ð / in Old English. Eth fell out of use during
14278-417: Was ousted by it in most dialects by the 15th. The following table shows some of the various Middle English pronouns. Many other variations are noted in Middle English sources because of differences in spellings and pronunciations at different times and in different dialects. As a general rule, the indicative first person singular of verbs in the present tense ended in -e (e.g., ich here , "I hear"),
14399-469: Was some inflectional simplification (the distinct Old English dual forms were lost), but pronouns, unlike nouns, retained distinct nominative and accusative forms. Third person pronouns also retained a distinction between accusative and dative forms, but that was gradually lost: The masculine hine was replaced by him south of the River Thames by the early 14th century, and the neuter dative him
14520-411: Was substantive, pervasive, and of a democratic character. Like close cousins, Old Norse and Old English resembled each other, and with some words and grammatical structures in common, speakers of each language roughly understood each other, but according to historian Simeon Potler the main difference lied on their inflectional endings, which led to much confusion within the mixed population that existed in
14641-456: Was the everyday vernacular word for testicles—as noted above, it was used in this sense in the first English-language Bible, in the 14th century. By the mid-17th century, at least, it had begun to acquire coarse figurative meanings (see § Bollocking ), for example in a translation of works by Rabelais . It did not appear in Samuel Johnson 's 1755 dictionary of the English language. It
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