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A recent discussion about whether the line "I'm gonna have to science the shit out out of this" was in @andyweirauthor's book The Martian or just the movie reminded me of one of my favorite facts: "science" and "shit" are related. So let's science the shit out of this etymology.
It all starts (as so many of these things do) with Proto-Indo-European. The root *skey meant 'to cut, split, separate'. The extended form *skeyd became "scit" in Old English.
The "sc" sequence was originally pronounced "sk" in Germanic, but it became /ʃ/ (the "sh" sound) in Old English. The "sh" spelling came later under the influence of French scribes.
So how did a root meaning 'to cut, split, separate' come to mean 'feces'? From the notion of separating it from your body. The same metaphor is found in the Latin "excrementum", which employs an (unrelated) root meaning 'to sift, separate'.
This means that "shit" probably started out as a euphemism. It was fairly neutral for a while and apparently didn't become taboo until around 1600, at which point it mostly disappears from print.
Euphemisms often become sullied by the connotations of the thing they're euphemizing, which leads to the need for new euphemisms, a process sometimes called the euphemism treadmill.
(By the way, the "ship high in transit" etymology is pure . . . well, you know. @KoryStamper's excellent book Word by Word covers this in more detail: amzn.to/2Mh6gkQ)
In Latin, the PIE root *skey gave rise to the verb "scire" 'to know, to understand'. It probably went from 'separate' to 'distinguish' (that is, 'tell things apart') and then to the more general sense of 'know'.
The noun "scientia" was formed from "scire" and meant 'knowledge'. It became "science" in French and then was borrowed into English.
The Latin "scire" gives us a whole bunch of other words too, including "conscience" (from "conscire" 'to know well, to be aware'), "conscious" (also from "conscire"), and "nescient" ('not knowing, ignorant'), which also gives us "nice".
"Nice" is a great example of just how much meanings can change. Though it originally meant 'ignorant', it shifted through 'foolish' to 'lascivious, wanton' to 'showy, ostentatious' to 'refined' and 'well mannered'. The OED records a lot more obsolete senses.
In Ancient Greek, the root *skei yielded "schism" and "shizo-", as in "schizophrenia" ('a splitting of the mind').
Back in English, *skei also yielded "shed" (meaning 'to cast off', as in shedding skin, but not the "shed" meaning a storage building).
It probably also gave us "sheath" (from the notion of a split piece of wood in which a sword is inserted) and "shingle" (because shingles are split off of a larger piece of wood).
The Online Etymology Dictionary says it also gives us "shin" (from the sense of 'thin piece', though that's a little opaque to me). etymonline.com/word/shin#etym…
But it also gave us, via Old Norse, "skin", probably from an extended form meaning 'to peel off, flay'.
It also gives us "shiver" (in the sense of a small chip or fragment of something), which still appears as a dialectal word for 'splinter'.
And *skei appears to be a variant of another root, *sek, meaning 'to cut', which gives us words like "segment" and "insect" and the English "saw".
It may also be the origin of Saxon, after the signature long knives that the Saxons carried.
The root *sek also gave us the names of some other cutting tools, including "sickle" (probably from the Latin "secula"), "scythe", and "share", as in "plowshare" (but not, apparently, "shears" or "scissors").
Anyway, I thought that was a really fun word family and just thought I'd share (and, yes, "share" is related too, from the notion of dividing what you have with someone else). Enjoy!
