[Ads-l] Valid First Use of "Shit Happens" ?

[Shapiro, Fred]

It has just dawned on me that I am responsible for a kind of etymological urban legend that is not accurate.  The Yale Book of Quotations indicated that Connie Eble printed "Shit happens" in her 1983 compilation of University of North Carolina slang, and this factoid has gained some notoriety in the media as the earliest known use of the proverb.  But Eble's wording was actually "That shit happens."  To me that is not the real proverb, as it refers to some specific shit as occurring with some frequency.  The true proverb is a general proposition about the prevalence of shit in the world, which the Eble citation is not.

Can anyone help point me to the earliest discoverable general-proposition citation for "Shit happens" ?

Fred Shapiro

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org