"Joe McIntosh" wrote in message
...
In the 16th and 17th centuries, everything had to be transported by ship.
It
was also before commercial fertilizer's invention, so large shipments of
manure were common. Thus evolved the term
"S.H.I.T," which has come down through the centuries and is in use to this
very day.
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I love this everything I see it. Keep 'em coming Joe! Last time it was a
golf term.

Well, clever as that all is, etymologists everywhere must be holding their
noses right about now. According to my dictionary, the word "****" is much
older than the 1800s, appearing in its earliest form - before 1,000 A.D. -
as the Old English verb scitan. That's confirmed by lexicographer Hugh
Rawson in his bawdily informative book, "Wicked Words" (New York: Crown,
1989), where it is further noted that the expletive is a distant relative of
words like science, schedule and shield. They all derive from the
Indo-European root skei-, meaning "to cut" or "to split." For most of its
history "****" was spelled "****e" (and sometimes still is,
euphemistically), but the modern spelling of the word can be found in texts
dating as far back as the mid-1700s. It most certainly did not originate as
an acronym.

Chris