Unwritten Books
2: The S-Word: Four (Other) Letters of Filth
[Once upon a time, perhaps a decade back, a senior publisher expressed interest in a book that featured slang’s favoured synonym for defecation: shit. I was of course keen: this particular four letters play almost as central role in slang as do those that start with ‘F’. My friend Jesse Sheidlower having set the standard (high and scholarly) with his F-Word (1995 et seq.) I could do no more than offer as my title the less savoury but undoubtedly multiply slanged S-Word. In the event the senior publisher grew sufficiently so as to die, and my outline and the half-promised contract were each wholly forgotten. Shit happens. No-one else seems to appreciate it. This was my pitch, but without the necessary rabbi 1 it fell on stony ground and today it’s merely a long-forgotten document, dusted down, creases half-flattened. And please note: if anyone fancies stealing it, they will have to climb the hill that is my research. And to pillage that, no, I do not offer even the thought of permission. Only the plagiarist’s much-deserved award: the blivet]
There are 650 words and phrases using the four-lettered S-H-I-T in the English slanguage. This book gives you all of them.
______________________________________________________
The Background:
Unlike standard English, which wanders off into philosophizing and other such intellectual ponderings, slang prefers the concrete. What it might term in its own words, the down and the dirty. Quite unashamed, it cheerfully says the unsayable. Shouts it, even. This includes what some might term obscenities, and others – rather more of them – the ‘dirty words’.
Not all slang words and phrases are dirty, but one can pretty much bet that all those that are considered ‘dirty’, in other words, taboo, are going to appear in the pages of a slang dictionary. This is to use ‘dirty’, although slang doesn’t really go in for abstracts, as both figurative and literal. It is to slang that we turn for the seventeen hundred terms that mean (heterosexual) sexual intercourse, the fourteen-hundred apiece for the organs we use to perform it; we look to slang for the nastier end of insults, of calling people mad or stupid or ugly and not, one can be sure, in a nice way. Slang gives us our racist vocabulary and the words that one nation uses to attack another. Slang is all too human.
Which means of course that when it comes to bodily functions, where do we look but amongst the slang word lists. And of those functions, what could be more ‘dirty’ whether literally or figuratively than what standard English terms defecation, the disposal of human waste.
For what standard English terms defecation (literally to ‘purging (oneself) of dregs’, in this case human waste whether solid or liquid) slang offers around 650 separate terms (which places it around the mid-point of the taxonomy of primary obsessions). They range from drop the kids off at the pool to take a dump, and choke a darkie to poop. Among the earliest references – we find it around 1560 – was turd, which referred to something that had been ‘torn’ from the body, and not far behind that came crap, which referenced the waste material left on a threshing room floor. Slang may deal in the sordid, but its language often comes with impeccable underpinnings.
However this display of slangy waste disposal is but to dance around our focus. We shall certainly find a place for the major synonyms, but for now, let us forget such as crap and caca, number twos and big jobs. The word that counts, the word that is most widely used, the word that in common with all the best obscenities covers so wide a range of possibilities and opens itself up to so many interpretations (though virtually none of them of course would count as positive), and appears in so many forms – nouns, verbs, adjectives, compounds, derivatives and phrases. That word is shit. A genuine four-letter word. Or, if we tip our hat, however begrudgingly, to the current self-abasing desire for self-censorship let us call it The S-Word.
It is old, a genuine ‘Anglo-Saxon’ word, and of course a ‘four-letter’ one. It come from Old English scite, dung, backed up by scitte, diarrhea. Like a number of its ‘dirty’ peers, it remained in standard use for some time before in entered taboo. Among the earliest examples categorized as slang - indicated when the full word is no longer permitted an appearance, and that vowel is coyly excised - comes in 1699 when the literary publican Ned Ward, observing contemporary London in his capacity as ‘The London Spy’, noted ‘The mixtures of Scents that arose from Mundungus-Tobacco, foul Sweaty Toes, Dirty Shirts, the Sh—t Tub, stinking Breaths and uncleanly Carcasses.’2
It appears, naturally, on those occasional lists of ‘dirty words’ issued by one authority or another in response to the latest moral panic. That of the defunct British Broadcasting Standards Committee, published in 2000, has it at 17 out of 27 (two places less potent than in 1998 and way behind the chart-toppers cunt, motherfucker and fuck; though wanker, surely somewhat anodyne in such company, came fourth while God, tipping the hat to a persistent fear of blasphemy, received the wooden spoon.) On the other hand in American comedian George Carlin’s recitation of ‘Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television’ in 1972 the S-Word topped the pops in a selection that ran: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. Even earlier, in 1966, Lenny Bruce, explaining how he had been arrested for saying eight words, then reiterated the lot: balls, cocksucker, cunt, fuck, motherfucker, piss, shit, tits. But Bruce was using alphabetical order and every one, perhaps, was a winner. It is all more than a little absurd. One thing, however, remains irrefutable: when it comes to the obscene, shit is a keeper.
It is perhaps fitting that it was the S-word, indeed what one might term the ‘S-deed’, rather than any of its four-letter peers, that set in motion the process of English language censorship. This started in the later 17th century when the courtier Sir Charles Sedley was arrested for ‘excrementizing’ from a tavern balcony in Covent Garden. He was only fined, but remarked that surely, ‘this was the first time a man ever paid for shitting.’ The link to censorship may seem tortured, but Sir Charles was heard drunkenly swearing and blasphemizing too and when it came to ‘dirt’ the courts weren’t interested in fine distinctions.3
Researches for Green’s Dictionary of Slang have found approximately 650 different uses and definitions of the S-word. From ain’t shit to what the shit! And taking in examples from Chaucer to Irving Welsh. Few slang terms can rival its potential, whether used literally or in a wide range of arresting images.
To quote US humourist David Sedaris, in his piece ‘Town and Country’ in When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008) ‘Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whatever condition the speaker desires. Hot as shit. Windy as shit. I myself was confounded as shit.’
The S-word is a mini-dictionary all to it itself.
_____________________________________
A Note on My Title:
Once upon a time words were words and spelt accordingly. All words were supposedly equal. Yet all is relative and those who were, for whatever reason, seen as less equal than others, were gelded, usually by the removal of their vowels. There were no illusions, but printers could relax free from legal constraints and authors and readers need neither offend nor be offended. The words in question, of course, were the ones we tabooed. Usually focused on parts of the body and what we did with them. Now, in a world of what some call sensitivity and others political correctness, we have a new system. Words which we would rather not say – whether for their supposed ‘dirtiness’ or the offense that modernity attributes to racism, are not words but —words. The F-word, the N-word and many others. The usage seems to have begun in the early 1970s. It need not indicate an obscenity nor indeed a racist slur, but simply means ‘unmentionable’, sometimes merely because the world has got fed up with hearing it. But let us not pretend, ‘ —words’ tend to be dirty. Among them, high on the list, is the S-word. What standard English terms stool, or to be at stool4, and slang, eternally careless of manners, spells out as shit.
_________________________________________
[Two samples; these are meant to illustrate the style of treatment rather than actually chapters. As can be seen, there are strains in ‘Versatility’ – stupidity, physical movement – that would be equally well included in focused chapters, e.g. movement or stupidity.]
The S-Word: VERSATILITY
For a word that, let’s be honest, does not stand alongside the more appealing things in life, the S-Word is remarkably versatile. All over the place, as the phrase has it, like a madwoman’s shit. OK, one can’t deny that its uses, in a variety of phrases, tend to the negative, but used it is Indeed, being three-dimensional, and with certain undeniable characteristics, it works very well as a description, especially when the intention is far from positive.
For instance, there is the simple put-down, the derogative. This can be physical: the overly lean person being so thin you can smell shit through them, while the obese one is ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag, a measure that can also be found in the term blivet, apparently coined by US fliers in New Guinea during World War II and occasionally euphemised as ‘2½ pounds of crud in a one pound can.’ Soft as shit and twice as nasty is used of anyone the speaker dislikes; whether the ‘soft’ (which echoes one of the debated Dutch etymologies of poppycock, nonsense, which may amalgamate pap, porridge plus kak, excrement, though the OED prefers poppe, meaning doll) means loosely compacted or stupid depends on context.
Stupidity is less problematic. As in other slang synonyms the story is of un-knowing, usually of some form of A from B. There is, of course, the basic not know shit (about), where shit means ‘anything’, but the literal rather the abstract form is also productive. Thus not know shit from apple butter, with its variations …from beans, …clay, …(a) salami, …tunafish, ...owlshit from putty without a map, ...dung from honey or sheepshit from cherry-seed, mean both to have no idea about a topic and to have ideas but to be particularly wrong in them. One of the best-known, though it has never crossed the Atlantic from America, is not know shit from Shinola. Shinola may sound like a the name of a town, e.g. Pensacola, but it was a brand of black shoe polish. (That the original phrase was ‘doesn’t know shit from Shinola and thinks they are both fat meat’ merely confuses the issue, and may cast a shadow over American butchery.) In this case the variations include not know shit from shine, ...from toothpaste, crap from Shinola and, gentler, not know cattle from Shinola; once again one’s ignorance can be general or specific. The phrase has lasted well beyond the firm (long-since taken over by another) and even entered popular culture. This in the 1979 movie The Jerk the ingénu Navin R. Johnson (Steve Martin) was questioned by his father as to whether he recognised this vital difference before setting out from home. It also appears, in part, as a Dolly Parton song-title: ‘Shinola,’ though Ms P’s lines run ‘You don't know love from shinola / You don't know what true love’s about.’ Shinola, and shit, reappear in not say shit about Shinola, still all-American, and meaning to say nothing. Geography is also found in the phrase from shit to Shinnecock (presumably linked to the Shinnecock Indian Nation Reservation on Long Island, though the reason is probably no more than convenient assonance), of any sort whatsoever, across the entire spectrum.
The imagery, if not the adjacent nouns, continue. Basic stupidity comes with not know from shit, or indeed not know shit, both of which use shit as an abstract meaning ‘anything’, but there are developments. Not to know a sparrow’s shit about something, playing presumably on the size rather than the actual turd, means to know nothing whatsoever. You don’t know whether you want a shit or a haircut is chosen to epitomise idiocy and confusion, as is an inability to decide whether to shit or go blind, which also crops up as pee or go blind, squat or go blind and shit or buy gas. On similar, if not specifically excremental lines, are not knowing if one’s arsehole is bored or punched and where one’s behind hangs (cousins, as it were, of not know one’s arse from one’s elbow, itself a genre that showcases those who have problems distinguishing the posterior from such items as a hot rock, an adding machine, an avalanche, third base, a musket, a double-barrelled shotgun and the redneck’s perennial favourite, a hole in the ground.)
Perhaps even more damning is the simple not fit to shovel shit, which encompasses any sort of failing the speaker suggests, and the dismissive not worth a shit, which doesn’t have to be restricted to people. Finally there’s the punning you’re all about – like shit in a field, which can be translated as ‘you’re a useful, alert, efficient person – not!’ Last, but very far from least, comes shit-for-brains, occasionally dick-for-brains (which is really one of that great family of penis = fool terms), shite-for-brains or the euphemistic poop-for-brains, which may possibly equate shit with some abstract nothingness, but is probably quite literal.
Shit’s stereotypes have their uses. It’s malodorous, and don’t try pretending that it isn’t. If you do, then it leads to accusations of snobbery: to think or act like one’s shit don’t stink or to think that same shit smells like ice-cream. Not surprising that a snob is known as Lord or Lady Muck (sometimes of Bog or Turd Island). He or she wouldn’t say ‘shit’ even if he/she had a/his mouth full of it tweaks the snobbery, and is used in Canada to denote an especially mealy-mouthed, hypocritical person.
Many terms involving the body deal, naturally, with waste and are dealt with accordingly, but not all. Australia, that fertile, inventive land, offers I’m so hungry I could eat a shit sandwich – only I don’t like bread. The image is both repellent and spot-on. And the anatomy yields up the concept of shit-strings, as yet undiscovered but surely there, part of those mysterious forces that hold us together and which thus, under stress, can be ‘broken’. In this they represent a grand old slang tradition, notably that of the twattling strings which as early as 1594 refer to the sphincter, usually in the context of breaking wind. Thus the pamphlet Arse Musica of 1722 reports on ‘My Lady Brag-fart, who has spoil’d many a Concert with over blowing her Pipes, and straining her Twattling-strings.’ Synonyms include the farting strings (a figurative part of the body, which can be damaged by some form of excess, usually laughter, e.g. ‘If you don’t stop that, I’ll bust my farting strings!’) and the puckering strings, which suggest muscles that constrain the anus, and if, again under pressure of strong emotions, may ‘bust,’ thus allowing the subject ‘shit themself’ both figuratively and if wholly unfettered, all too literally as well.
But on to higher things. Inter faeces et urinam nascimur, i.e. ‘twixt shit and piss are we born’ and if philosophers, in this case St Augustine (though some credit St Bernard of Clairvaux), can plumb the sewers in their pursuit, can humble shit then hold back? Indeed not, or, if one may stay religious, does the Pope shit in the woods?
Excremental philosophy, doubtless rightly, uses the vulgar tongue. No Latinisms here. Shit, we are informed, though perhaps more blithely by those who observe than those who participate happens. Shit also comes in piles. The daily round – life goes on as normal, with no surprises, good or bad – is skewered in same shit, different day. If that day turns out to be different – and problematic – then it’s a moment when the shit hits the fan, with an acknowledgment such problems have been expected to occur sooner or later. Alternative projectiles include the crap , but most are euphemistic: the brown stuff hits the fan, the ca-ca…, the cheese and chutney…, the doo-doo…, the manure…, the merde…, the spit…, the stuff…, the sushi…, the solids hit the air conditioning and the pooh hits the punka wallah. In which case one is advised to be calm, or don’t get your shit hot! which can also refer to losing one’s temper, especially if there’s no chance of a solution, or not a shit show.
Despite which, one may remain optimistic: to bet a pound to a pinch of shit or a fat man to a pile of shit (harder-core variations on slang’s many certain bankers such as Lombard Street to a China orange or London to a brick) denotes the speaker’s absolute confidence, whether in a real bet or merely a point of view. In which case the outcome is sure as shit. Or, since confidence still prefers reinforcement, …as cowflops, shit and taxes, shite on your shoe, as shit runs downhill from a privy, shit stinks and sure as there’s shit in a goat. One can never be too certain.
Shit also works, used as a comparison, to denote speed and proximity. For the first one finds like shit or crap through a goose, ...shit through a tin horn, ...shit off a shovel (or spit on a hot griddle and steam on piss), all images that have to be taken as read. There is like shit, usually preceded by some verb of movement, but watch the context: like shit can also mean badly (‘she did that like shit’) and very much.
The frictionless movement that underpins slick, gives a variety of combinations: slick as owl shit, ...cat-shit and shit-through a goose as well as an unappetising duo linked to another bodily product, mucus: slick as snot on a door knob or two snakes fucking in a barrel of snot. As for up close and probably far too personal, there’s like shit on a shoe (which one can at least remove), and the greater problems of like shit on a blanket, in which the closeness can be either physical or emotional and is often found as stick to someone like shit to a blanket. Like stink on (a) shit (otherwise funk on a skunk, stank on shit or stink on glue all come from black America and are all variations on the less noisome like white on rice.
There are other comparisons, notably as shit, which works in all sorts of contexts, usually as an intensifier, i.e. mad as shit, or as a simple simile, i.e. easy as shit (or indeed shitting in bed). For shit can mean both whatsoever or in any way but also very badly.
This is shit, no-one’s pretending that most of the relevant uses tend to the positive. They don’t. Yet even that, in what might most aptly be termed an arse-about-face manner, is available. Love expresses itself in a variety of ways. How many of us would opt to declare of the beloved object, I could use her shit for toothpaste (and piss for gargle water), with its even less palatable variations: I’d eat a mile of shit if it led to her asshole, or a yard of her shit for a lick at her hole. I make no pretences, these are repellent images, locker-room, lavatory-wall stuff – and yet... But less us not be too tolerant: love, we know, is blind; it also appears to have lost its sense of taste.
The S-Word: HEART and SOUL
Those who have, enjoyed is perhaps not the right word, so let us say experienced, the medical procedure known as a colonoscopy, whereby a camera is introduced via the rectum upwards into the intestinal tract, and assuming the kind doctor has administered some form of alleviating drug, will as they peer through the mists of palliative euphoria, focus on the convenient screen and note a maze of tubing. This is what slang, which boasts more than 80 terms for such pink wriggliness, terms variously the commissary department, the gormy-ruddles and indeed little Mary. In standard English, the stomach. And amid that tubing lurk certain…shapes. If one asks as to what these forms, reminiscent of a fleet of miniature zeppelins, might be, the informative medico will reply: ‘Stools’.
A stool, which originally abbreviated stool of ease (and thus ancestor of such terms as convenience or comfort station), is in itself interesting, since it takes the object and transforms it into a euphemism for the product of the act for which it exists. If we extend this then what the doctor is describing could equally well be described as toilets, or indeed little boys’ rooms, but it is not. These are turds and turds are compounded of shit. It is waste matter, but it has also come, in a figurative sense, to stand for the very essence of being: the shit.
Like some medieval humour – bile, phlegm and so on – which was seen as governing our character, the shit has been equated with our very soul; the innermost core that makes us tick. And as such it is subject to a variety of actions, mainly violent. Like its close relation, the piss, it can be taken, in the sense of teasing, although the verb shit, as in are you shitting me? (with its answer: ‘Would I shit you? You’re my favourite turd’) is an abbreviation of bullshit, to ensnare with nonsense, although that too returns to the ultimate root. The shit can also be the living shit, occasionally holy shit, and it can, straying from humanity, become the dogshit, (which may factor in a reference to dog as meaning unpleasant person, even coward) but the action and its meaning remain the same: treating someone else with extreme and physically aggressive prejudice.
The equation seems to have been formed in the mid-19th century, specifically in the US Civil War, the first war for which we have anything like a knowledge of the kind of slang the soldiers used. Thus the first example comes a Northern soldier’s letter of 1862: ‘If it were not for the difference in rank I would [...] knock shit out of you.’ Thereafter, and usually launched in the early 20th century, the variations keep coming. One can kick, knock, pound and slap the shit out of one’s victim. One can also beat, belt, thump, whack, whale, bash, stomp, thump and whip the shit, shite or dogshit from that same unfortunate. (Piss, as already noted, and crap, generally seen as less obscene, will of course fulfill a similar role as will such abstracts as the fuck.)
Beat adds in certain variations. Since the word can mean surpass and confuse, so too can beat the shit given the right context. Thus Hemingway, boasting in a letter of 1933 that ‘I can beat the shit out of any of them.’ ‘Them’ being his rival novelists. The violence can also be figurative and when the crime writer George V. Higgins has a character ‘start beating shit out of the sauce’ the action involves alcohol, not kitchenware. Nor is violence a pre-requisite: one can simply scare the shit out of that third party.
___________________________________________
THE SHIT LIST
[This is not the entirety of shit words: the entries labelled ‘shit’ offer many derivatives, compounds and phrases. The intent of this list is to offer material to provide a running footer along the bottom of each page (see foot of p. 1 for example)]
The S-Word Itself:
shit (main)
shit (derivatives and compounds)
shit (general phrases)
shit (comparative and proverbial phrases)
shit (figurative phrases)
shit (verbs suggesting the negative and the abstract)
shit (verbs dealing with excrement and trouble)
shit (exclamations)
Variations on a Theme of S.
ain’t shit
all over the place like a mad woman’s shit
apeshit
bad shit
batshit
bear’s chance of shitting in a swinging jug
beat the shit out of
beshit / beshitten
big shit
big shit!
big-shit-shot
bigshit
bird shit lime
bugshit
bullshit
bullshit!
bullshitter
bullshitting
bullshitty
chickenshit
chickenshits, the
cowshit
crock of shit
diddly-shit
dipshit
does a bear shit in the woods? Is the pope (a) Catholic?
dogshit
dogshit!
_______________________________________________________
chickenshit cowshit crock of shit diddly-shit dipshit does a bear shit... dogshit
_______________________________________________________
doodley-shit
dribbling shits
dumbshit
dumshit
easy as pushing shit uphill (with a pointed stick)
eat shit
eat shit (and die)!
eat shit!
for shit sake!
for shit’s sake! (also for shit sake! shit sake!)
fuckshit!
full of shit
gabshite
gaubshite
give a shit
give-a-shit
go and shit yourself!
go plait your shit!
go shit in a pot and duck your head!
go shit in your hat and pull it down over your ears (and call it curls)!
go shit in your hat!
go shit in your wallet!
gobshite
good shit
great shit!
grubshite
holy shit (on a shamrock)!
horseshit
horseshit!
hot shit
hot-shit
hot-shit!
I’ll be dipped in shit!
jackshit
jackshite
Jesus shit!
kid’s shit!
king shit
like shit!
lizard shit!
may your chooks turn into emus and kick your shithouse down
moose shit!
mother of shit!
muleshit!
nibshit
nit-shit
no shit!
no shit, Sherlock!
_______________________________________________________
fuckshit gobshite I’ll be dipped in shit like shit! muleshit! no shit, Sherlock
_______________________________________________________
no-shit
not give a shit
not worth a pinch of coonshit
not worth a shit
oh shit!
owl shit
piece of shit
piece-of-shit
ratshit
ratshit!
rip shit
rip-shit
sack of shit
sad sack of shit
shit a brick
shit a brick!
shit and derision!
shit and fall back on it!
shit ass
shit breader
shit creek
shit for!
shit for brains
shit hot!
shit howdy!
shit in it!
shit in it!
shit in your teeth!
shit me!
shit me easy!
shit oh dear!
shit oh dearie oh!
shit on me!
shit on you!
shit oneself
shit on…!
shit or get off the pot
shit street
shit the bed!
shit to!
shit! (also shitty! snakeshit!)
shit, eh!
shit, the
shit-all
shit and onions!
shit and piss!
shit on rye!
shit on toast!
_______________________________________________________
sad sack of shit shit for brains shit or get off the pot shit, eh! shit and onions!
_______________________________________________________
shit-ass
shit-brained
shit-eater
shit-eating
shit-eating grin
shit-for-brains
shit-fuck
shit-heel
shit-hot
shit-scared
shit-skin
shitbird
shitbound
shitbrains
shitbum
shitcan
shitcanned
shite
shite-poke
shiteing
shiter
shiters
shitey
shitface
shitfaced
shitfire
shithead
shithole
shithouse
shithouse rat
shitily
shitkick
shitkicker
shitkicking
shitlaw!
shitless
shitload
shitpot
shits, the
shitsack
shitten
shitten!
shitter
shitters
shitters, the
shitties
shitting
shittle-cum-shaw!
_______________________________________________________
shit-eating grin shitcanned shithouse rat shitkicker shitters shittle-cum-shaw!
_______________________________________________________
shitty
shitty-ass
snakeshit!
squirrel-shit
sweet shit!
tough shit
tough shit!
treat like shit
up to shit
well, I’ll be dipped in shit!
what the shit
what the shit!
what the shit...?
will I shit!
_______________________________________________________
shit or get off the pot shitey shitten shitload snakeshit! tough shit what the shit
_______________________________________________________
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/hpnzafi
Whether the omission of the term, full-out or gelded, from B.E.’s New Dictionary of the Canting Crew (1699) and the anonymously written New Canting Dictionary (1725) was filth-fearfulness, simple oversight or the sense that the word did not qualify, we do not know. It does appear in Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785 et seq.) but lost the ‘i’ from day one. Such would be the status quo until Eric Partridge’s work of 1937. This last was further confused by the self-proclaimedly squeamish lexicographer’s decision to take the OED as his guide. Even in the early-twentieth century, Oxford, to its credit, offered the word shit. No blanks required and Partridge duly followed suit. But the OED of 1933 passed over slang’s shit-stirrer and shithead, for instance, and thus for these one finds Partridge preferring ‘sh-t’. (The OED now offers shit-stirrer, uncensored; shitheap remains absent).
According to the diarist Samuel Pepys, Sedley ‘showed his nakedness - and abusing of scripture and as it were from thence preaching a mountebank sermon from the pulpit, saying that there he had to sell such a pouder as should make all the cunts in town run after him […] and that being done he took a glass of wine and washed his prick in it and then drank it off, and then took another and drank the King's health.' This behaviour provoked a riot amongst the onlookers (Pepys claimed a crowd 1000-strong). In the case that followed Sedley was fined, and the Lord Chief Justice stated that it was because of wretches like him ‘that God's anger and judgement hang over us’
the classic use of which was Winston Churchill’s dismissal of his portrait by Graham Sutherland as ‘an old man at stool’.
Shit, eh!
Delightful! Or de-shite-ful?