Unemployment lingo (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Wilson Gray]

In the military of my day, the term was totally neutral, whether noun
or verb. I had never heard "shitcan" till I joined the Army and I've
never heard "shitcan" used outside of the Army, well, randomly, from
other ex-GI's. OTOH, in the Army, I never heard "shitcan" clipped to
"can."

-Wilson
–––
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



On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: Unemployment lingo (UNCLASSIFIED)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> FWIW, I think of "can" (meaning "fire [smn]") as derived purely from
> "trash can"/"garbage can", as in "Can it!" = "Shut up!", and when I
> first heard "shitcan" v. I took it as an angry intensive form. Does
> Cassell's give a reason for their etymology?
>
> Mark Mandel
>
>
>
> On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Benjamin Zimmer
> <bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> FWIW, when I waas in the Arny fifty years ago, any trashcan that
>>> wasn't used for the disposal of left-over food - a "garbage can" - was
>>> called a "shitcan." Throwing something away was referred to as
>>> "shitcanning" it.
>>>
>>> I've always felt that "can" in the sense of "fire" - I got *canned* -
>>> was a clip of "shitcan," unless it was based on the old, sadistic,
>>> children's game of tying a can to a dog's tail, still not unheard of
>>> as recently as the war years, i.e., during WWII, for you younger folk.
>>
>> Cassell's supposes this sense of "can" (v.) is derived from "toss out on one's
>> can," and "shitcan" (v.) is an intensified form thereof.
>>
>>
>> --Ben Zimmer
>
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