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World Wide Words says that know one’s oats, to know one’s oil, to know one’s apples, to know one’s eggs, and even to know one’s sweet potatoes, are variants of to know one's oats, all of which appeared in the 1920s.
When I was growing up. it was beans. If listeners found your opinion enlightening, you knew your beans. You were full of beans if you didn't know shit from Shinola. I must have been about 12 when I first came across a tin of Shinola, although I'd been using paste shoe polish every Sunday morning for years.
Nobody seems to know where the expression came from. although the "onions" version was used in 1924 in Harper's, and seems to have been the most popular. I hadn't heard it in years, until I ran across it tonight in "Nerve", a 1964 novel by Dick Francis. It is now extinct, or have I been traveling in the wrong circles?
Shit is funny that way. I want my shit, you can keep your nose out of it, but your shit, I don't want you handing me any of it.
I was reading about shit in "Origins of the Specious" a couple of days ago. Supposedly, boxes were stenciled "Ship high in transit" because if fried shit gets wet, it gives off methane, and the ship could explode. The author said nobody is going to ship bull shit across an ocean, because there is a plentiful supply local to anyplace humans live. Birdshit, yes; they have fought wars over guano, but it doesn't have the methane problem.
I wonder, though, why anyone would *box* it. It's a bulk commodity. They used to burn the forests of north America and ship the ashes to England, to make lye, but they didn't box it up; they just shoveled it in. They don't box coal, either, whether it's headed to Newcastle or someplace else.
So the next time I hear something about "a load of crap", I'm going to ask how big the boxes are that it comes in. If you pinwheel the last four pallets, can you get 44 in a standard 40-foot trailer, or are they too weak to be stacked?
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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