Topical Guide 555
Mark Dorset
Actions, Consequences of One’s: Unwelcome: Crapulence
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 7:
The ride is making Matthew dizzy; he’s begun to feel a little crapulent […]
Apple’s OS Dictionary:
crapulent | ˈkrapyələnt | adjective literary
relating to the drinking of alcohol or drunkenness.
DERIVATIVES
crapulence | ˈkrapyələns | noun
ORIGIN mid 17th century: from late Latin crapulentus ‘very drunk’, from Latin crapula ‘inebriation’, from Greek kraipalē ‘drunken headache’.
Hugh Rawson, Wicked Words: A Treasury of Curses, Insults, Put-Downs, and Other Formerly Unprintable Terms from Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present:
crap. Labeled “coarse slang” when it finally gained entrance to the OED (1972 supplement), the term is nevertheless euphemistic for the stronger SHIT both in the literal, physical sense, and in extended uses where it stands for rubbish, nonsense, and insincere or downright deceitful talk, e.g., “It’s the same old crap. One agency blames another and all the years of study are down the tube” (New York Post, 6/14/78). Or a quaint comeback reported by a visitor to Florida: “I know crap when I see it. Don’t have to eat it to be sure” (personal communication, 1984). See also BUNK.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about crap is how recently it has acquired its excremental meaning. In the general sense of chaff, residue, or dregs of something (such as husks of grain or settlings of beer), the word dates to the fifteenth century. As the residue of people, it appears first in the late seventeenth century in the form of cropping ken, or privy (where the ken is a house and the crop may allude to the leftover crop that is left on the ground after harvesting). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people began paying visits to crapping casas, cases, and even castles (the latter presumably were furnished with euphemistic thrones). Thus, the excremental sense was in place before that eminent sanitary engineer Thomas Crapper (1837-1910) devised his valveless water waste preventer for W.C.s (1882). The short form, crap, doesn’t appear in print either as a noun or verb referring to defecation until the mid-nineteenth century, however, and it took some years for this sense to contaminate the term. For example, Mark Twain rendered crop as crap when imitating the dialect of East Tennessee in the opening of The Gilded Age (1873): “’Ole Drake Higgins he’s been down to Shelby las’ week. Tuck his crap down, couldn’t get shet o’ the most uv it, hit warn’t no time to sell, he says, so he fotched it back again . . .’” It is unlikely that either Twain or his collaborator on this novel, Charles Dudley Warner, would have committed this word to paper if the coarse meaning were widely known at the time. Nowadays, it is all much different, of course, and it is impossible to use such words as crapulence, crapulent, and crapulous without causing bad thoughts to come to people’s minds even though the long words, all having to do with eating or drinking too much, are entirely unrelated to the short one.
Setting: Dark, Secluded, Dangerous
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 7:
He hasn’t been paying attention to where they’re going, and now when he looks out the window he doesn’t know where they are. […]
“Where are we?” Matthew asks. He doesn’t see any buildings when he looks out the window, just the steel uprights that support the bridge approach, some heavy equipment lined up under the roadway, enormous, bulky, dark, and looming, mounds of earth and rubble, stacks of something shrouded in tarpaulins, nothing more.
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