more fan-hitting

[Wilson Gray]

Aw, geez, guys! You know that, if I had a story, I'd tell it!

To the best of my memory, there was once a ruler of some mythical,
Middle-Eastern country, the shan, perhaps even he of Irabek. Somehow
or other, his supply of nookie got cut off. He  stood it for as long
as he could. Then, one day, he simply snapped, going stone crazy and
raping every being - and not a few hole-ish objects - in the entire
shandom. When the workers in the shandom's Dept of Public Utilities
and those of the local Red Object had recovered to the point that they
could again walk and / or sit down and had begun the clean-up of the
shandom and the hospitalization of its population, they came across a
barefoot boy with cheek of tan who was - startlingly! surprisingly! -
totally unscathed!

As the members of the Red Object rushed over to care for him, one asked:

Blessings on thee, little man!
Where wert thou when the fit hit the shan?

Since, somehow, I hadn't yet heard the expression, "when the shit
hit(s) the fan," I was left standing there with my face hanging out,
wondering what everybody else was laughing at. Then, after the point
was explained to me, I still didn't get it.

Shit hitting a fan, you say? What? When? How would that happen? Huh?
Uh, what was that, again?

I've since caught on.

-Wilson

On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 10:51 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: more fan-hitting
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 8:55 PM -0500 10/11/08, Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:
>>Hi Wilson,
>>   It's not based on a pun but on a scatalogical joke, where the
>>stuff really did hit the fan.  I treated this topic in Comments on
>>Etymology, vol. 20, no. 8, May 1991, p. 12.  I'll mail you a copy on
>>Monday.
>>
>>G.
>
> Ah, but other inquiring minds want to know.  Couldn't you summarize
> the scatological joke in this forum?
>
> L
>
>>________________________________
>>
>>Original message from Wilson Gray, Sat 10/11/2008 8:16 PM
>>
>>How long has "shit hit the fan" been around? Ca.1953-55 in Saint
>>Louis, there was a joking pun? / punning joke? whose punchline was,
>>
>>"Blessings on thee, little man!
>>"Where wert thou when the fit hit the shan?"
>>
>>I heard the pun *before* I heard the actual expression, so that I had
>>to have the point of the pun explained to me and, even then, I had to
>>study over it awhile. I couldn't easily picture how it would come
>>about that shit would be hitting a fan.
>>
>>-Wilson
>>
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--
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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