Someone is going to come for your time today. They will arrive in your mentions uninvited, dead behind the eyes, with a series of barked cliches, and they will demand from you a response. Attention, these Lomanesque sophists will cry, must be paid.
You will tell them to eat shit.
Perhaps you suggested that we might be better served by not forcing so many of our people into medical bankruptcy. Oh, so you want to live in Venezuela? they will reply. You might have offered that a fair fewer guns in circulation could possibly, maybe, be a reasonable step toward curbing the epidemic of gun violence in the country. Look at Chicago, they will say.
You will tell them to eat shit.
When the Epic Logic Warriors come for your time, online or elsewhere, you will not give it to them. They are not looking to engage in debate, or to carry on a civil conversation, or whatever other disingenuous framing they present; they are trying to frustrate you. You won’t let them. You already know what you’re going to do.
While the phrase is universal around the world—I’m particularly fond of the musicality of come mierda in Spanish—and extends back into antiquity, today, right now, eat shit is the most beautiful expression we have in the English language. It’s succinct and blunt in its quick percussive beats—say it now, your jaw moves sharp like the thwack of a machete—but it’s also exceptionally efficient in the depth of expressiveness it manages to convey in just two syllables.
You might amend it further for emphasis (see also: "eat shit and die"), but you scarcely even need to.
It’s the singular insult of these incredibly stupid times, not just because so many people are walking around out there right now with mouths seemingly designed to carry feces, but because the instinctual and casual use of the phrase requires little aforethought and is an equal and proportionate response to the type of nonsense so many people are eager to send our way.
It wasn’t always king, even recently. Eat shit is, of course, another way of saying fuck you. But for all its ubiquity, there’s still something oddly personal about saying fuck you. Brandishing a fuck you typically comes with an implied emotional investment in the interaction on your behalf, one that eat shit is unburdened by. To be compelled to say fuck you means you have at least, in some way, been made to care in a manner that eat shit does not.
Go fuck yourself, to be sure, has had an illustrious run of its own, but it can be unwieldy if not applied correctly, and feels almost telegraphed in its lengthier wind up to the pay off.
For years, a sharp-elbowed retire bitch maintained a place of primacy in the derisive internet parlance, but that too has been dulled by overuse and memeification.
There was even a brief period where delete your account carried some sting, but, well, you probably remember what happened to that.
Eat shit, though. Good old, reliable eat shit. They can’t take that from us.
The taboo against coprophagia has had an unsurprising staying power. So too has the concept of telling someone to eat shit as an insult lasted. Aristophanes had a wiseass slave calling Asclepius a skatophagus in Plutus all the way back in 380 B.C. To be an eater of shit is to be a lowly beast. Dogs eat their own shit. Flies and dung beetles eat the shit of other animals. To tell someone to eat shit is to dismiss them as unworthy of the human-to-human response among equals that anything more elaborate implies.
There’s also an analogous meaning of the term eat shit. When skateboarders or snowboarders or athletes in other similar sports fall, they say they ate shit. To eat shit then is to fuck up, which is what the people who are coming for your time have done when they obfuscate and lie and confuse. They tried something, to be sure, and then they fell on their ass. When you tell them to eat shit you’re not only telling them what to do next, you’re describing what they’ve already done to themselves. They already like the taste, you’re just directing them where to get a little more.
