(no subject)
Turns out, Ed Groat, in his house that dated back to the early nineteen hundreds, had a series of fireplaces on every floor. One in the basement, two on the first floor, and two on the second floor. Sometime during the seventies, just after his folks passed, and during a deep winter energy crisis, he had the fireplaces retrofitted with wood burning stove attachments.
“Yeah, I mostly heat that somebitch in the winter with my woodstoves,” Ed said.
“Not bad,” I said. Wood heat, as far as I could see it, was free heat. Free fuel. Chop up some trees or some skids. Haul wood out of the forest. It was everywhere.
Well, with these piles of dog shit he had meticulously sun cured, and packed away in paper bags, he would, as a sort of revenge, burn in his wood stove.
“Dem somebitches,” he said. He laughed. “Dem somebitches burn good.”
Ed also was a sort of history buff. He had read somewhere that during colonial times, the word “shit” etymologically evolved from an acronym scrawled on the sides of barrels, as dried feces were transported by ship to the new world as fuel to burn.
“Store high in transit,” Ed said. “Shit,” he said.
Apparently, things stacked high on a ship had a tendency to fall down and get damaged or fall off into the water completely. So the term store high in transit came to be shortened to shit, and thus feces became synonymous with that acronym.
“Somebitches started calling it shit,” Ed said.
“Damn,” I said.
“No,” Ed said, “shit.”
“It’s really not a bad word,” he said, “just a historical fact.”
William Comparetto
© 2006