Shittin'

Fascinating piece HERE on the psychological history of shitting and pissing. You all know my bewilderment with dudes who can't piss at urinals when there's another dude nearby, which is addressed:

 Intense fears surrounding public urination, dubbed ‘paruresis’, are common and often disabling, limiting people’s movements and causing humiliation and pain, as in one sufferer who blacked out and crashed to the tiles from the sheer effort of trying to find relief at a public facility. Although paruresis bears many hallmarks of social anxiety it is unique enough for one writer to propose a new class of ‘sphincteric phobias’. Milder forms of bashful bladder are widespread, a fact established by a study that used a periscope in an adjoining toilet stall to assess men’s urine-streams at a public urinal. Time to begin urinating increased steeply the closer another user stood to the unwitting participant (Middlemist et al., 1976).

In their defense, I am usually unable to perform any intestinal droppage if I know someone else is within hearing range, so. To each his own. The bottom line is, nothing makes sense in the fucking corporate shitter.

On a side note, he also discusses the use of the word "shit" by people with Tourette's:

Coprolalia, literally ‘shit speech’, is a prominent feature of Tourette’s syndrome. Although all manner of obscenities or indelicate expressions may be involved – one Peruvian man repeatedly blurted orders to make him coffee – scatological expressions are the most common. The first reported case, the Marquise de Dampierre, a woman of ‘distinguished manners’ presented by Jean Itard in 1825, would exclaim ‘shit and fucking pig’ at inopportune times, and one of Gilles de la Tourette’s original cases included a boy who favoured ‘shitty arsehole’. The preference for excremental language appears to be widespread across cultures, although admitting distinctive forms, such as the unique Japanese expression kusobaba (shit grandma).The universality of excremental blurting in Tourette’s syndrome is surely no accident, as cross-cultural studies of swearing find scatological expressions to be ‘the undisputed leader among the taboo themes’

Of course, years ago I thought I had nailed the answer:

...why is it that the words these people always involuntarily shout out are "bad" words? What's this from? No one with Tourette's ever shouts out "truck bamboo watercolors!!"

So I think you see where I'm going here...I'm calling bullshit on Tourette's. Why WOULDN'T a kid pretend to have a "disease" where he gets to shout out bad words? This would be like me having an "uncontrollable disease" wherein I "had to" grab women's titties. Tourette kids: like the chicks in Salem, the jig is up.

More importantly, I haven't watched American Idol in years, but I feel like we're due for a contestant with an absolutely batshit, beautifully horrid case of Tourette's.