I'm reading a book, The Known World by Edward P. Jones. It is a very well written book about Black slave owners before the Civil War, that is, freed slaves who went on to own slaves themselves.
The book is written with a lot of Southern and Black vernacular which I find very convincing. But I was really jarred on reading the following exchange in chapter 7:
“Where he say?” the man asked the boy softly.
“Georgia. Where your damn ears?”
The man touched both his earlobes at once and said, “Where they always been.”
“Well, act like it. He said Georgia clear as the damn day and you didn’t even hear him. You closer to him than I am and you still didn’t hear him.” For the very first time ever, Counsel missed the evenings with his family, Laura playing the piano, Belle reading to the younger children. Make up your mind, God, that’s all I ask.
“You can go eat shit, boy,” the man said. “Pick up your goddamn spoon and eat shit.”
I first heard that phrase as a teenager, and just assumed it was made up sometime shortly before or during my lifetime. Reading it in a book set in the mid-1800s felt like I had stumbled on an anachronism. I wondered when the phrase was actually first used in English (and thought, "I know the place to ask.")
I knew shit was an old word (as a noun, since 1580s, as a verb, even earlier then that), but how old is the phrase "eat shit"?
Marginalia in illuminated manuscripts were sometimes very irreverent, and I
have seen some with eating of feces depicted, so it seems entirely possible that this was not an unknown phrase. Also, Sir John Harington in The metamorphosis of Ajax: a cloacinean satire (1596) makes a punitive fantasy of coprophagia, in feeding "poore hungrie fellowes” "all the fat offerings" made in London's privies. So… it is possible that it's very olde.
I don't like vulgarity; please forgive me. I was just really taken by surprise by coming across the phrase in a very well-written book. I don't mean to bring EL&U down. But if Jonathan Swift can use the word in a poem, I think it's fair game here.
Best Answer
I restricted my search to 'eat shit', although I included that phrase with the variant spellings 'shite', 'sh*t', 'sh-t', and 's--t', where possible. I also included the various inflections of 'eat'.
A troublesome instance in Supplemental Nights, 1888 (R.F. Burton), returned from a search for 'eat shite', footnoted "to eat skite" (as meaning "to talk or act foolishly") in reference to text reading "devour ordure":
The OED Online does not give 'skite' as a variant spelling of 'shite'.
The earliest unalloyed figurative use I uncovered was from a novel titled The Folded Leaf, published in 1945. This text clip is the excerpt from Google Books results:
The next appearance was not visually verifiable, as it occurred in a "restricted rights" novel about life in the infantry, Toward an Unknown Station (Allan Lyon), published in 1948:
Regarding the appearance of 'shit' (absent 'eat') in print prior to 1900, J. Wright, in The English dialect dictionary, volume 5 (EDD), compiled a fair-sized collection of dialect uses from the 1600s through the 1800s, some dated. These are clippings of the primary entries:
Nowhere in Wright's collection, neither in Volume 5's main entries nor in Volume 2's entries for 'eat', did I find the 'eat shit' phrase.
Eric Partridge, in his annotated 1963 edition of the third edition of F. Grose's A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (full text not available; the link is to the 1796 edition of Grose), provides a good summary of the use of 'shit' in the early 1900s. In the snapshot below this paragraph, Partridge's historical summary begins with "--In 1914-1918 ...", and his summary of the senses found in EDD appears after "--Dialect has many ...". The surrounding material in Partridge's annotation is based on information from the Oxford Dictionary (OD).
Regarding other negative results, the phrase 'eat shit' did not appear in my searches of
Of those, I could expect with a reasonable degree of certainty that if the phrase 'eat shit' had much currency in English prior to the 1900s, it would've been likely to appear in Farmer & Henley.
Altogether,
suggest that, with the troublesome exception of Burton's footnote, the earliest appearance in print of 'eat shit' may be the use in the 1945 novel, The Folded Leaf.
Nonetheless, it is unreasonable to suppose that 1945 use is, in fact, the earliest appearance of the phrase in print; the 1945 use is merely the earliest print appearance I could uncover with a limited set of resources.
Further, aside from appearance in print, the use of the phrase 'eat shit' in dialectal speech before the 1900s, even dialectal speech in antebellum Virginia, is not unreasonable--merely unlikely.