Turd

This ancient term has followed the same basic semantic route historically as shit , being first recorded in Anglo-Saxon times in a plain literal sense, leading to various metaphorical extensions of coarse abuse from the medieval period onward. Etymologically the word turns out to be a distant relative of legal tort , both rooted in the concept of being twisted or crooked. The early contexts all refer to animal excrement, such as “swines tord” in the Anglo-Saxon Leechdoms , ca. 1000. The strangely graphic identification turd bird was a provincial name for Richardson’s skua even in the nineteenth century. The first metaphorical extension is to phrases like “I don’t give a turd,” found about 1250 in the polemical poem The Owl and the Nightingale (l. 1686). A surprising instance is recorded in the OED from the Minutes of the Archdeaconry of Essex (1619–1620) when a demand was made for rent from a person holding land bequeathed to the poor of the parish: the person “bid a turde.” Insulting personal uses, always exclusively masculine in application, are recorded from about 1450 in the morality play called Mankind (l. 127) and are followed by some spirited quotations such as “The foul-mouthed knave will call thee goodman Tord” (1598 in Edward Guilpin’s Skialethia , 37). Although Shakespeare never used the word in a personal way, Ben Jonson was more robust with the crude dismissive insult “turd i’ your teeth” (1614, in Bartholomew Fair , I iv). The epithet turd-faced occurs in the rich contemporary source of insults, The Flyting of Mongomerie and Polwart (1585, l. 787) and in Charles Cotton’s Works (1678): “Basta! No more, you wrangling turds” (l. 223). Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) uses the euphemized form t—d but gives many amusing but no insulting uses.

Thereafter there is a curious hiatus in recorded usage until the early twentieth century, when a thriving currency is resumed. Turd is now used indiscriminately to mean “a worthless or contemptible person,” more commonly in British than American English. Generally speaking, the term is less critical and condemning than shit .