First, the joke:
Harry Truman made a speech at the Washington Garden Club. He gave credit for his beautiful flowers to the good "manure" he used to fertilize them. The prim and proper ladies didn't think much of the President's repeated use of the word "manure."
One of them said something to the First Lady, Bess Truman. She asked Bess if she could make him stop using the word "manure." It was a vulgar word in their opinion, and he was, after all, the President of the United States.
Bess replied, "Heavens no! It took me twenty-five years to get him to say 'manure.'"
That particular substance goes by many names. They can be roughly ranked in a scala stercore by the force and direction of their connotations: shit/crap, feces, stool, poop, scat, and manure or muck. Shit or crap are wholly negative: the smell! the color! the gluey adhesion! (by the way, is one worse than the other? Is this dependent on regional variation?)
Feces by contrast is strictly objective: no notion of good or bad, simply observing the passages of nature. Stool is a bit more engaged: nurses need to notice it as well as other bodily outputs, so it needs a mild, mostly neutral word.
Poop by contrast is chatty, good for mild irritation, accepting of the daily nature of it. It is even sometimes positive, as parents know. “Has he pooped yet?” may simply be following up on the recovery from an intestinal distress. Scat is both the neutral term of wildlife observers and the hopeful trace for hunters.
Manure and muck are the most positive and perhaps most truthful of them all. What exits the body is not eternal; it is meant to continue to transform and in its turn become the source of life for something else. Muck, an old synonym for manure, is at the core of perhaps the most trenchant and true passage of political economy:
Above all things, good Policie is to be used, that the Treasure and Moneyes, in a State, be not gathered into few Hands. For otherwise, a State may have a great Stock, and yet starve. And Money is like Muck, not good except it be spread. This is done, chiefly, by suppressing, or at the least, keeping a strait Hand, upon the Devouring Trades of Usurie, Ingrossing, great Pasturages, and the like.
Francis Bacon
When you’re caught in a shit storm, it’s hard to think of it as manure. But the green shoots are already rising.