Trivial note re "poop" = "information"

[Jonathan Lighter]

Actually, there's a 1941 also, but it's a little hard to notice.

  "Poop" as information seems to have its roots at West Point. The 1911 West Point yearbook, _The Howitzer_, includes the following (p. 227):

   Poop...A speech; a thing to be memorized.

  If later custom is any guide, this particular kind of "poop" may refer to ridiculous pseudo-information memorized by plebes for instant recital on demand of an upper-classman. This practice was/is also common at Annapolis.

  Lucian K. Truscott IV's novel _Dress Gray_ (1978) (rpt. N.Y.: Fawcett Crest, 1980), p. 241, offers a latter-day ex.:

  "He knew the famous 'How is the cow?' poop when the rest of them were still
stumbling over their three answers. 'Sir, she walks, she talks, she is full of chalk. The lacteal fluid extracted from the female of the bovine is highly prolific to the nth degree, sir!"

  In _A-Train: Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman_ (Tuscaloosa: U. of Ala. Press, 1997), Charles W. Dryden gives exactly the same spiel, which he was made to memorize as a "dodo" during flight training at the Tuskegee Institute during WWII.  There was also this:

  "'Dummy, what time is it?'

  ..".'Sir, I am deeply embarrassed and greatly humiliated but due to circumstances over which I have no control, the inner workings and mechanisms of my poor chronometer are in such a state of discord with the great sidereal movement by which time is so commonly reckoned that I cannot, with any degree of accuracy, state the correct time. However without fear of being too far off, I will state that it is exactly _____ minutes, ______ seconds, amd tick tocks past the hour, sir!'"  (Dryden, p. 40)

  JL

Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Trivial note re "poop" = "information"
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The OED On-Line has 1973 for its earliest cite for "poop" vs. "poop
sheet." When I was in the Army in the late 'Fifties, "the (straight)
poop" was a common expression. There was also a weekly ritual called,
officially, "Troop Orientation and Education" or "TO&E." At some
posts, this might be a half-holiday.

On other posts, TO&E could be merely a gathering of the members of a
unit in a post [movie] theater, at which the headlines of some
newspaper or other might be read aloud or the post chaplain, a poor
Southern Baptist, forgetting where he was, would remind us that,
despite our being free, white, and twenty-one, we were still sublect
to the laws of God and those of the military.

In this latter case, TO&E was known as "poop for the troops," punning
on poop's other meaning of (bull)shit.

-Wilson

--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

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