to shit in one's own mess-kit

Tue Jun 1 22:22:48 UTC 2010

1919 _The Outlook_ (August 27) 654: When two Americans meet on the street of
any Rhineland town . . . "Last evening? Why, I was schlafen." "Schlafen
nix!" "I hope to step in your mess kit if I wasn't schlafen."

George's roommate seems to have been something of a pioneer. 1964 (or by
implication 1945) is the date to beat for def. 2.

JL
On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 5:39 PM, victor steinbok <aardvark66 at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       victor steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: to shit in one's own mess-kit
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> [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 Beachā€ˇ - 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 danceā€ˇ - 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:
>
> Adventureā€ˇ - 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. Ā (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. Ā 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". Ā 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:
> > Ā  Ā b. U.S. slang (humorous). I hope to spit in your mess kit and
> variants: (as a mild oath) ā€ beyond a doubtā€™, ā€ certainlyā€™, ā€ I'm
> telling the truthā€™.
> > 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, ā€ Hope to spit (or
> worse) in your mess kit!ā€™ 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. Ā HDAS has J. J.'s meaning:
> > "2. to blunder seriously; to get oneself in trouble -- usu. considered
> vulgar" (Really? Ā J. J. utter a vulgarity? Ā Surely not!) Ā But HDAS has
> this from only 1989 & "1968-1990". Ā 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. Ā The vaults
> are stuffed with silver, that the worker sweated for. Ā --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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