to shit in one's own mess-kit

[victor steinbok]

[no links included--all GB references were snippets--some may need to
be verified]

Would you consider the post-Yiddishism "[You] don't shit where you
eat/sleep" to be of the same kind? This one certainly carries more
than just "blunder" meaning--it's a mess of one's own creation.

I would have expected the interpretation to looks more like the
Russian expression "putting sticks in the wheels". But it got an even
better remake in modern fiction:

Amber Beach‎ - Page 75
Elizabeth Lowell - Fiction - 1998 - 475 pages
"How about it?" he asked. "Do you mind?" "Should I?" "You're within your rights
to tell Captain Conroy to go spit in his mess kit. ...

And it's not the only one:

Make the Kaiser dance‎ - Page 154
Henry Berry - History - 1978 - 455 pages
Then one of them says to the other, 'Go shit in your mess kit!' Can you imagine
such vulgarity?" A CLASH OF CUSTOMS There were certain customs of the French ...

There also seems to be a GB snippet that is dated (apparently
accurately) to 1923 with the OED usage:

Adventure‎ - Page 170
Fiction - 1923
"I hope to spit in your mess-kit there are. They're gone clean on up
the valley.
But they ain't one of 'em gone along that road either way since we was here ...

With OED's 1924 (same periodical?) and a couple of others in 1925-7,
this is a rather strong cluster. Most of these come with a
refrain--"it can", "there are", "he is".

VS-)

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 12:02 PM, George Thompson
<george.thompson at nyu.edu> wrote:
>
> When I was in grad school, one of my apartment mates was a guy named J. J. McDonough, born in Southie (South Boston) in the mid 1920s, and a veteran of WWII. Â (How he came to be the apartment mate of a 23-year-old, in 1964, was that after discharge he had taken 15 years out to get drunk.)
>
> In any event, a story in today's NYTimes, about home-owners who have given up trying to pay off their mortgages and are challenging their bank to foreclose and evict them, quotes a representative of a bank as saying that these people are exploiting the system. Â This brings to mind a frequent expression of J. J.'s, describing some grievous blunder surely to be followed by bitter regret -- "he shit in his own mess-kit". Â It's not the first time that this phrase has come into my thoughts, when reading of the sorrows of bankers and stock brokers.
>
> I find the expression in the OED, but not in J. J.'s sense:
>    b. U.S. slang (humorous). I hope to spit in your mess kit and variants: (as a mild oath) ‘beyond a doubt’, ‘certainly’, ‘I'm telling the truth’.
> 1924 Adventure 20 June 168, I hope to spit in your messkit I can! 1968 W. C. ANDERSON Gooney Bird 84 Ah hope to spit in yo' mess kit. They're wilder'n a Texas widow in heat. 1984 J. R. ELTING et al. Dict. Soldier Talk 197/2 Among soldiers and veterans of World Wars I and II, ‘Hope to spit (or worse) in your mess kit!’ was an emphatic expression of agreement.
>
> Providentially, JL also put this expression under mess-kit, not shit, so that it is not mouldering in the volume of HDAS that Oxford University Press isn't publishing. Â HDAS has J. J.'s meaning:
> "2. to blunder seriously; to get oneself in trouble -- usu. considered vulgar" (Really? Â J. J. utter a vulgarity? Â Surely not!) Â But HDAS has this from only 1989 & "1968-1990". Â JL has been reading deeply in military memoirs lately -- does he have anything more?
>
> The banks are made of marble, with a guard at every door. Â The vaults are stuffed with silver, that the worker sweated for. Â --This also has been coming to mind with some frequency of late.
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

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