A Toilet Paper: A Treatise on Four Fundamental Words Referring to Gaseous and Solid Wastes Together with Their Point of Origin. Rev. ed.

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“The invisible is as present as the visible. The space between
things—stars, chess pieces, words on a page—defines existence as
much as the thing itself. Without the featureless background of this
paper, you would not be reading these words. Where there is no ground,
no feature is possible. An object is characterized by what it is not, as
much as by what it is.”

This, believe it or not, is the introduction to a book about the
following four words—arse, fart, shit, and turd. Author Rachel Mines
holds a Ph.D. in English with a specialty in Old English poetic meter.
Few people are likely better qualified to write about these ancient
Indo-European words (all four are more than 5000 years old) that were
once acceptable parts of everyday speech and even used by Chaucer and
Shakespeare. Yet all four are now banished to the nether regions of
profane language.

Mines reminds us how hypocritical we can be about these words. Polite
people know that when someone says “Shoot!” they really mean
“Shit!”; or when we say “To get off scot free” we actually mean
“To get off shit free.” Yet placebo profanity is perfectly
acceptable in genteel company while the real thing is not.

Mines seems to absolutely love the word “turd,” which she describes
as like “a dowdy but genteel old woman living in quiet retirement
after a lifetime of globetrotting.” What she means is that the word
started off as Indo-European but comes to us from the Latin tormentum,
which also gives us the root word for torment and torque. Mimes’s
writing is scholarly, yet droll. Where she falls down is when she balks
at describing why these four words are now considered vulgar: “I
cannot pretend to understand why the ordinary Anglo-Saxon words for
bodily elimination have in the last few centuries become taboo.”
Ending the book this way reduces it from a treatise to a mere tease.