Scatology

Derived from a Greek word meaning “dung,” the term and its adjectival form, scatological , are now purely pejorative, referring euphemistically to language or literature that is “filthy” or unwholesomely concerned with feces. However, the original sense was literal, referring to “that branch of science which deals with diagnosis by means of the faeces” ( Oxford English Dictionary ), a sense that continues in paleontology. The term serves the typical purpose of the classical register by referring to a taboo subject in an abstract or opaque fashion. When the noted Oxford scholar George Saintsbury, in his History of Elizabethan Literature (1897), dismissed “large quantity of mere scatology and doggerel” (x, 307), his was the first recorded use applying the term to low-grade literary work, rather than to its content.

The OED added a meaning defined simply as “filthy literature,” which it described as “rare” but did not illustrate. This sense has become relatively common, in relation to certain authors, notably Jonathan Swift, as in Norman O. Brown’s reference: “The most scandalous pieces of Swiftian scatology are … The Lady’s Dressing Room, Strephon and Chloe and Cassinus and Peter ” (1959, xiii, 179).