[Ads-l] "Looking to showcase women who do shit!"

[Laurence Horn]

Seems more like "get shit done" is positive ("shit" = 'stuff').  "do shit" can be positive (even in "women who do shit") or negative ("it bothers me that someone who did shit in the Senate for umpteen years is now spouting off"  = '...nothing...').  But as with other squatitives, "know shit" seems to be pretty strongly negative, with or without an overt negator:

He knows shit/squat/zilch/bupkis (about it).
He doesn't know shit/squat/zilch/bupkis (about it). 

LH


> On Feb 14, 2016, at 6:52 PM, Benjamin Barrett <mail.barretts at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
>> On 14 Feb 2016, at 15:31, Scott <harview at MONTANA.COM> wrote:
>> 
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
>> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>> Poster:       Scott <harview at MONTANA.COM>
>> Subject:      Re: "Looking to showcase women who do shit!"
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> 
>> On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 11:47:36AM -0800, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>>> 
>>> How about if you change the intonation pattern? E.g., “She does (a lot of) shit/She gets her shit done.” BB
>> 
>> Interesting. I do hear "She gets her shit done."  Never "She doesn't
>> get her shit done" but only "She doesn't get shit done." (More likely
>> "doesn't do shit.") So a possessive makes shit positive! SS
> 
> Good examples. How about “She never gets her shit done”? I think there are a bunch of permutations that make this difficult to track. BB
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