Hi everyone, I have a goofy book excerpt for you today! You can probably guess from the title that the book is about shit, quite an analysis of the word and its usage around the world, but that means the content might be considered crude so please proceed at your own discretion. Author Gary Marinin mentioned to me that Know your Shit started as a project for ESL/EFL to understand over 1,000 ways native speakers use the word, but also developed into using pop culture, psychology and references to make it interesting to all readers. Let’s connect with him and then read a bit from the book.
Get to know the author: Gary
Welcome to Armed with A Book, Gary! Tell me and my readers a bit about yourself!
Hi I am Gary Marinin. I am a digital nomad and world traveler, having lived in Macedonia, Kosovo and Mexico. I freelance on Medium and like to write about topics that I am passionate about, which vary from workers’ rights to women’s rights and everything in between. Know Your Shit is my debut book, but there are several others in the works ranging from psychology and linguistics to general humor about my cats.
What inspired you to write this book?
My cat initially inspired me to write “Know Your Shit” because I’d often call him a “brick shithouse” and one week I had heard the word so often that I just took five minutes to write every phrase and expression that came to mind. I was extremely surprised at how easy it was to do for five minutes and I knew that I hadn’t even scratched the surface. I also teach ESL/EFL and get questions about slang occasionally.
How long did it take you to write this book, from the first idea to the last edit?
It took me around one year to do. I got so into this project that I actually reduced my work this year by around half to dedicate time to research and writing.
What makes your book unique?
I looked around before really expanding on this idea to see if anyone had already done this, but my book is the first true “shittionary”. Every academic I reached out to that works with linguistics was supportive and they all had the same message that I was doing valuable work because there can never be enough material on colloquial English.
Who would enjoy reading your book?
Anyone that isn’t easily offended by cursing. It’s not something that has to be read in order. You can literally flip to any page and explore a new term or expression.
What’s something you hope readers would take away from it?
How fascinating languages are! Taboo words aren’t just used to offend people, but have many purposes to reflect ideas and the longer they’re in use, the less you think of them as a taboo. 100 years from now, we might think of “fuck” the same way we do “bastard” at the moment.
Do you have a favourite quote or scene in the book that you find yourself going back to?
I had no idea what to do for “Tough Shit” and kept coming back to it, but an idea finally clicked that I could just do something outrageous. I eventually decided to make my own creation story.
Know your Shit
Did you know that there are over 1,000 ways to use “shit”? That’s just in North American English alone! You’ll probably learn more than you ever wanted to with Know Your Shit. It dives into the general history and psychology of swearing in general, but takes a particular focus on “shit” in American and Canadian English. Uses of “shit” are explained with cultural and personal examples and context through quotes from movies, shows, celebrities and comedians.
A creative non-fiction book for native and non-native speakers alike. Learn to be more persuasive by including the right swear at the right time and place for your gender, be more interesting at cocktail parties with fun historical facts, or enhance your abilities to swear. It’s something for everyone!
Content Notes: Strong language, cursing.
Book Excerpt
The degree to which it’s a taboo does have to do with who uses it and how it’s used18. Imagine going to a church and the priest starts sprinkling “shit” or “fuck” into the sermon. Doesn’t sound natural, does it? Now imagine going to a garage and the mechanic says, “there’s some shit wrong with X…”. You probably wouldn’t have anywhere near the same reaction as with the priest in a church. At first, you might be saying the mechanic is probably less educated or more uncultured. That’s a different debate because judging intelligence has large biases. Einstein’s opinion on that matter was that “everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”. If you have a biased system of measurement, you’ll make the same judgement of people in professions requiring manual labor, like the mechanic above. You can take that same mechanic and put him or her in a more formal setting, like a wedding or theatre, and it probably would surprise you when they swore. There’s a time and place for everything, but it’s mostly how we perceive the combination of people, professions, and situations. Something that also might amaze you is that there’s also been a study done on the different types of social situations related to which words were used in each situation and their frequency of use. “Shit” was the only one that made it into all the categories!
My most memorable, and all-time favorite, use of vulgarity came from my niece. English is not her native language and she hadn’t started learning it at the time. To paint the picture, she was 6 years old and very well mannered. My hypothesis is that she heard me swear at some point and after my wife beat me at a game of Sequence, she came to the table, looked me straight in the eye and said, “fuck you”. But it wasn’t just any “fuck you”, she had a look in her eye that was dead serious and the tone to match. She said it at least 7 or 8 times and really drew out the “fuuuuuuuuccccckkkk yoooouuuuuu” on several of them. It was almost in a whisper at some point. My wife and I assume she meant “you lose”, but it was so shocking that it caused quite the fit of laughter. You never expect something like that from such an innocent looking kid. Children learn and associate taboo words with emotions and I probably used “fuck” to express disappointment from many losses.
My hypothesis is that she was telling me “fuck you” to let me know that I was a disappointment for losing that game. Children learn languages much quicker than adults and this is just more clear evidence because she even used it in the right context. My wife and I were very proud of that fact.
Interested?
Find Know your Shit on Amazon and Goodreads. Many thanks to Gary for sharing about his book. You can follow him on Instagram, Goodreads and Facebook.
If you are an indie author and would like to do a book excerpt, check out my work with me page for details. I will be back tomorrow with an indie book review! Until then, happy reading!
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