Crap

As a less vulgar synonym for shit , the term covers almost exactly the same basic semantic areas of “feces,” “nonsense,” “rubbish,” or “insincere talk” in both American and British English, though more widely used in the former. However, unlike shit it has never been used as a direct personal insult. The sense of “rubbish” leads back to the origins of the term in Medieval Latin crappa , meaning “chaff” or possibly Old Dutch krappen , “to harvest.” It is first recorded in the fifteenth century in the sense of “chaff, residue, or dregs.” While it is not easy to distinguish between the various senses of “rubbish” or “waste” that accumulate around crap , they seem to have solidified into the main sense of “excrement” by the eighteenth century, especially in the forms crapping-casa, crapping-castle , and crapping-ken , various terms for a toilet. (A related form, cropping-ken , is recorded in Elisha Coles’s dictionary of 1676.)

This evidence for the term’s antiquity is significant, if only because it questions the basis of the frequently retailed explanation of the origin of crap in the name of a famous innovator, Thomas Crapper. Several popular studies treat the word as an eponym, or term derived from a personal name. This is a typical example:

To crap is to defecate and derives from Crapper’s Valveless Water Waste Preventor which was the name under which the first flush lavatory was sold in England. The inventor, Thomas Crapper, who was borne in Thorne, near Doncaster, in 1837, delivered England from the miserable inconvenience the garderobe. (Boycott 1982, 35)

Unfortunately, this appealing story turns out to be a folk etymology, or a plausible but unsubstantiated explanation of the origin of a term. It is unsupported by any major reference work, since the meaning had evolved before the appropriately named Crapper was born.

The modern short form of the word did not appear in print in the sense of defecation until the mid-nineteenth century. Hugh Rawson cites the interesting instance of Mark Twain using the form crap for crop when imitating the East Tennessee dialect in The Gilded Age (1873), commenting: “It is unlikely that either Twain or his collaborator on the novel, Charles Dudley Warner, would have committed this word to paper if the coarse meaning were widely known at the time” ( Dictionary of Invective 1991).

Perhaps because the term did not have the same level of taboo as shit , it was used more freely and extended semantically to accommodate more meanings, especially in the United States. In the course of the twentieth century, there have developed numerous compounds such as crapbrain, craphead , and the punning crapshooter , as well as the main senses of “pretentious talk,” “nonsense,” “bold and deceitful absurdities,” “offensive or disrespectful treatment,” and “anything of poor or shoddy quality.” Many of these senses have filtered back into British English. Of the usages that remain peculiarly American, there is the exclamatory sense: “O crap, it’s broken again!”; the verbal sense of “to lie or exaggerate”: “Don’t try and crap me!”; and various idiomatic uses such as “a bunch of crap,” a locution of President Nixon’s preserved on the Watergate tapes.