another fake acronym

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Tue, 16 Aug 2005 12:28:46 -0700, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

>Those of you who still think that our common word for excrement, hence
>junk, comes from Old English or PIE have some catching up to do.
>
>Anybody born yesterday knows that it's from the famous old transportation
>phrase, "Store High in Transit," applied to stuff that had to be piled
>high for shipping for some important reason, usually because it was
>manure that was likely to explode otherwise. Packing it high in the
>ship's hold kept it from blowing up. For some reason.
>
>Don't take my word for it.  This 16th C. acronym was revealed as long
>ago as Jan. 21, 2003, on Usenet group alt.sailing.asa, as part of the
>discussion called Store High In Transit.
>
>Since then, 500 websites have been spreading the, er, word.

This one goes back much earlier than that-- it appeared in an alt.sex post
from 1994:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/alt.sex/msg/162a4b70246c0a45

Another acronymic expansion is "Ship High in Transit," though that one
only goes back to 1999 on the Usenet archive:

http://groups-beta.google.com/group/rec.aviation.rotorcraft/msg/7cb4a4e92c713b15


--Ben Zimmer