Origins of Words

I read this recently, but cant vouch fot the truth thereoff.

Untill the coming of the railways most Westcountry goods traveled by sea. One of the most common cargoes was various forms of manure, Seaweed, sand and shells and dung. these were all dried out for transport to save weight
and loaded in the ships hold. Sometimes water would leak in with disasterous results, the cargo would swell up unbalancing the ship and give off methane resulting in explosions. To try and avoid this containers were marked Ship High In Transport, leading to the contents becoming known as SHIT.

I heard the same thing a while back, but it is tosh I'm afraid.

For a start, since when has there been a need to transport manure by boat?

How would it explain the same word in other languages (scheiss, sitki etc)?

Acronyms are a relatively recent thing as well I believe.

Bude Canal was originally called the Tamar Manure Navigation and was used to transport seaweed/shells (for the lime) to the Tamar Valley. But I agree that the story is probally rubbish.

Bump.

Lots of 'manure' was brought up the Tamar to spread on the fields adjoining the valley. It was known as Dock Dung - the original name of Devonport. On the allotments here you regularly uncover bits of pottery, glass, buttons etc that were brought up with it.

Not etymologicaly exact, but WD-40 is interesting in as much as where it's name comes from. I only found this out recently.

WD-40 is the name straight out of the lab book used by the chemist who helped develop WD-40 back in 1953. Norm Larsen, was attempting to concoct a formula to prevent corrosion, a task which is done by water displacement. Norm's persistence paid off when he perfected the formula for water displacement on his 40th try, hence WD-40.

Taxi.......................

knecht wrote:

Lots of 'manure' was brought up the Tamar to spread on the fields adjoining the valley. It was known as Dock Dung - the original name of Devonport. On the allotments here you regularly uncover bits of pottery, glass, buttons etc that were brought up with it.

And if there was a large amount it was known as a 'shit load'.  

Talking of shit loads, there's shit loads of interesting stuff here as well as a big shock for our friends in Exeter!