With time, the s-word became a crutch for poor language, a lazy escape to replace a structured statement such as a sentence, which has a verb and a subject.

Remember the good old days when shit actually meant shit?

Bowel movement, poop, fecal matter, stool, this is the correct meaning behind that shit!

Yes, it’s hard to believe this is what the s-word actually means. And, no, it doesn’t say sword (no matter what Sean Connery might say on “Jeopardy”).

Stool. Let’s break down that word. There is the letter S, followed by the word tool. So an s-tool could be considered a shitty grammatical tool for improperly finishing a statement or answering a question.

At school, bars and friends’ houses, it seems that it is inevitable to hear the s-word in a conversation.

You probably heard that phrase “That movie was the shit,” meaning the movie was excellent. Unfortunately in the context of the phrase, the correct meaning behind this statement states that the film was bad.

If people, unaware of these slang ramifications of the s-word, heard it in relation to the film’s quality, they would believe the film to have been awful.

With time, the s-word became a crutch for poor language, a lazy escape to replace a structured statement such as a sentence, which has a verb and a subject.

The “phrase” itself is an unfinished sentence. With the lingual evolution of the slang use of “shit,” our dialect has become nothing but unfinished phrases and incomplete sentences.

The s-word has invaded our daily interactions to the extent that when we ask what someone’s weekend was like, we get an incomplete thought that doesn’t even answer our question. “You know man, just shit.” Perhaps one would need to consider tone and facial expression to figure out the meaning “shit” holds in this case.

Another example of this is the ironic and gratuitously used “that shit tastes good.” Hmm, I feel sorry for their dentist.

That fact that people use slang words in conversations so much tarnishes their ability to describe an object or feeling to its fullest extent, leading to the use of ”umm” and having an inferior sense of vocabulary. Overt slang usage essentially undermines intellectual insight and serves as defense mechanism against linguistic effort.

With the absence of verbs and adjectives (but not nouns, as “shit” is a noun), we lose an understanding of and general participation in conversation, as one only gets unwanted digested pieces of lexicon.

Other variations of the s-word include the puzzling “jack shit,” a way to intensify the force behind the s-word; “well, no shit,” meaning something is blatantly obvious; “holy shit,” the blasphemous version of expressing surprise; “shiiit,” the Ebonics dialogue filler, an interjection with no particular meaning; “to give a shit” meaning caring about something; and even “when the shit hits the fan,” to denounce a situation gone awry.

In this fast-paced world, efficiency and speed are deemed essential, but are we being more productive in using slang words instead of proper grammar? Is the extensive use of the s-word a way to avoid vocabulary expansion and cerebral effort?

Maybe this viewpoint is somewhat drastic and, to some, completely pointless, as through time all languages inevitably change, but the s-word seems today to hold an overt, if not also creative, misuse of brain tissue.

So why do we use it?

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