Always demand proof, proof is the elementary courtesy that is anyone’s due.
—Paul Valéry, "Monsieur Teste"

The e-mail generally looks like this:

Subject: Fabulous bit of historical knowledge

Ever wonder where the word "shit" comes from. Well here it is:

Certain types of manure used to be transported (as everything was back then) by ship. In dry form it weighs a lot less, but once water (at sea) hit it. It not only became heavier, but the process of fermentation began again, of which a by-product is methane gas.

As the stuff was stored below decks in bundles you can see what could (and did) happen; methane began to build up below decks and the first time someone came below at night with a lantern. BOOOOM!

Several ships were destroyed in this manner before it was discovered what was happening.

After that, the bundles of manure where always stamped with the term "S.H.I.T" on them which meant to the sailors to "Ship High In Transit." In other words, high enough off the lower decks so that any water that came into the hold would not touch this volatile cargo and start the production of methane.

Bet you didn't know that one.

Here I always thought it was a golf term.

This bit of fiction has been traced back, in a different form, to a Usenet posting from 1999. That one merely made reference to the smell. This is all pretty harmless, as a set-up for the "golf" punchline. But because it has the look of authentic history, it has begun to circulate as a legitimate etymology.

It has in common with a number of the other most common false etymologies a tendency to derive words from acronyms (The ethnic slur wop is said to represent "without passport," and fuck is variously said to stand for "fornication under consent of king" or "for unlawful carnal knowledge").

This Internet fabrication is a deliberate and audacious lie meant to complicate that which is simple, mislead, and give secret pleasure to the anonymous author of the cleverness. It is the equivalent of a computer virus. It is, to borrow from Richard Dawkins, a false meme.

To someone with a bit of linguistics in his books, the story sets off more red flags than a May Day parade. The first and biggest is its reliance on acronyms. Sir Ernest Gowers, in his revisions to the second edition of "Fowler's Modern English Usage" (1965, p.116) traces the rise of the acronym to World War I (ANZAC, etc.), but it really didn't becom a common method of word formation in English until World War II. The word acronym itself wasn't coined until 1943. The lack of a need for such a word suggests the degree to which acronyms were not a part of daily life until then.

As Gowers illustrates with many examples, modern wars breed acronyms. The American Civil War, the first modern war, produced a vast corpus of correspondence and official papers. But I find scant use of acronyms in them. The North's black regiments occasionally are named as U.S.C.T. (for United States Colored Troops). But these usages did not transpire into the common language of soldiers or civilians. Other Civil War abbreviations used today, such as ANV for "Army of Northern Virginia," are popular among modern writers, but nowhere in the Official Records.

The insult son of a bitch is recorded from 1707; the abbreviated form SOB is on record only from 1918. POW for prisoner of war was first attested 1919, but it was not popularized until World War II. A.S.A.P. for as soon as possible is not recorded before 1955, and again it turns up first in military slang.

So acronyms in English are on the whole a 20th century phenomenon. The word OK (c.1839) is a very rare exception (if the most accepted theory of its origins is the right one), as is n.g. for "no good" (1838). And note how these words, even after more than 170 years, are still "felt" as abbreviations and require no elaborate Internet stories.

Before that, there were "acrostics." Those are words in which each letter in turn is taken as the first letter of another word or name, which taken together hold some significance. An example is the word cabal, which wits noted in 1673 matched the initial letters of the five intriguing ministers of Charles II (Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale). This was a sort of word-play that had gone on for centuries in verse composition. But cabal was a real word: it had been in print for at least 60 years before someone happened to notice this temporary political connotation. The initials weren't the source of the word.

The word shit has a long and well-documented history, far older than any large-scale organized sea-trade in northern Europe. Anglo-Saxon leechdom books use scittan in reference to cattle having diarrhea. A Latin text from 1118 refers to "Lues animalium, quæ Anglice Scitta vocatur, Latine autem fluxus interaneorum dici potest."

There are many examples of the verb from the 14th century [e.g., from 1387: þey wolde ... make hem a pitte ... whan þey wolde schite ...; and whanne þey hadde i-schete þey wolde fille þe pitte agen."]. The noun is attested from the 16th century, both in reference to excrement and to contemptible people.

The acronym theory of the origin of shit can't explain the related words in other languages, such as German Scheiss, Dutch schijt, Old Norse skita, and Lithuanian sikti, which come from the same prehistoric root. As far as I know, there's no corresponding acronym to "ship high in transit" in the merchant marine history of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Which brings up another point. It's impossible to prove a negative, and I'm not the world's leading expert on shipping, but I have done a great deal of historical research, including detailed examination of ship's manifests going back to the 17th century and studies of trade and tariffs and commerce, and I've never found anyone anywhere shipping manure. People shipped a lot of strange things over long distances (bricks, for instance). But if there's one thing that an all-seeing providence has liberally supplied to every inhabited corner of the globe, it's shit. Who ever transported it often enough that shit-shipping evolved a jargon? Guano -- bird droppings as a source of nitrates -- became an important article of trade in the mid-1800s, but this is much too late for shit, and anyway guano is guano, shit is shit.

A correspondent notes another problem: "I am a sailor. Things go below deck to stay dry ... they don't generally get wet there." Another, a physics teacher, writes, [M]ethane gas would not 'build up' in the hold of a ship. It is lighter than air and in any unsealed space would dissipate upward fast enough that an explosive mixture would not accumulate."

So, the acronym theory for the origin of "shit" breaks down because:

• the word itself is a good 1,000 years older than the common use of acronyms;
• the original form of the word (Anglo-Saxon sc-, which regularly evolved into M.E. sh-) does not correspond to the supposed acronym;
• the verb is the original form, the noun derives from it; the acronym supposes the noun came first;
• no one has produced a single instance of this supposed acronym from any old mercantile record or ship's manifest;
• in fact, no one has ever established that there was a custom of shipping manure;
• the word has cognates in many other languages, including ones outside Germanic, for which no acronym theory of origin makes sense;

Say it with me: "shit is not an acronym." Repeat 100 times for every time you forwarded that e-mail. Now go forth and sin no more.