From: Victoria de Rijke <v.derijke@mdx.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 15:06:47 +0100
To: geoffcox <geoff@generative.net>
Subject: Ordure

Geoff,
You might want to pass on to Stuart Brisley (or that Gypsy friend of his)
something I read in Geoffrey Hughes's new book The History of English Words,
relating to what he calls the two 'vocabularies of our bodies' (outer and
inner).
He traces an historical journey for the word 'shit' from: Anglo-Saxon 'shit'
or 'turd', to Middle English *'ordure', Renaissance *'excrement', through
Augustan/Victorian 'crap' to Modern *'defecation'.
It struck me that the two languages (inner & outer) were somehow
differentiated via the Romance origin of the word (marked with an *) though
Hughes does not say this.
I'm not sure if this comes up in The History of Shit, does it?
Victoria.