Shit Hot

The origin of the saying is unknown, but merits pondering.. Early man would have noticed that his/her feces was only body temperature and not actually hot so the saying probably didn’t come from him. No, with one exceptional possibility, the saying most certainly must have come into existence after the invention of fire.

Adam and Eve probably didn’t invent fire nor was it in existence in the Garden or shortly after they got kicked out. Now consider this. Adam takes a dump on a flat rock one hot summer day. Leaves to attend to his nashing of teeth. Eve happens by to see steam hissing from Adam’s sun hot leavings. Eve very well may have been the World’s first pervert. I mean there are people who get turned on by feces and their lineage certainly leads back to the Original Aboriginals. Here is the possibility of not only the beginnings of vocal communication but indeed, the first words. Eve points at the steaming pile whilst enthusiastically yelling in her Neanderthal Mid-Eastern dialect: “Shiia tot!”, loosely mimicking the sound of the steam, hissing and popping on the hot rock. It logically follows that after a few generations of Eve screwing all her relatives that ‘Shiia tot’ could have possibly evolved to Shit Hot.

That considered lets move on. Suppose there were no really hot days back then. Under that supposition we must conclude that the expression emerged after Adam’s time. Sometime between Adam and Noah, fire must surely have been discovered. We are talking a lot of time here because by the time Noah shows up the Earth is covered with animals and people who still don’t know how to act with God in process of ending their days, and he did say that the next time he destroys the Earth he will do it with fire. Noah most certainly must have known about fire because he would have had to use pitch to seal his boat and pitch is heated tar. Now there’s a thought. Would he actually have called it pitch or tar? Back then he may not have had a word for pitch just like Eve’s bewilderment with Adams steaming pile. What use would there have been for the sticky stuff? No one else had boats because according to the fundamental interpretation of the Bible, it had never rained so there was little use for a water sealant such as tar. (No rain means no large bodies of water to evaporate or contrary to the laws of physics: no evaporation. Lets think that one through in another tome.)Now Noah is building a giant boat and sealing it with his unknown sticky stuff. For lack of a better utterance did he call it shit? Picture Noah returning from lunch one day and vaguely pondering a long-forgotten word , asks his kids, who he had tasked with heating the pitch : Shit hot? This makes sense because the hot pitch is a good thing. It means that it is ready to pour in the seams between the planks of the boat. What would their answer be? No Pop, Shit cold? Noah would have interpreted that as either a typical teen-age sarcastic response, or they hadn’t been attending to the task he had set before them before leaving for lunch. Shit cold never made it into the lexicon so chances are they responded enthusiastically: “Shit Hot!”

This could have caught on quickly because the sooner the tar was ready the sooner they would leave for lunch. No there was obviously no money in Shit Cold. Shit Hot became the call sign for success. There is a remote possibility that pitch and shit came to be used interchangeably. FF to two nerd engineers and like all nerds realize they are such but can barely help themselves. “Jeepers Herby. Your warp speed idea is really swell..er shit hot. Lets pitch it to the boss.” The boss has three ways to respond: “Rootie Kazootie fellas! This idea of your is really swell..er I mean Shit Hot! or Are you shitting me a load of pitch? Or pitching me a load of shit?” Either way this “shit hot” idea of yours will never fly.” From boiling tar to manufacturing Jet airplanes, shit hot has survived as a graphic description of something exciting.