The poop deck of the replica ship HMS Surprise, a re-creation of 24-gun Royal Navy frigate housed at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. A view looking aft on a replica of an eighteenth/nineteenth century frigate.
23 March 2022
When children learn that the raised deck at the stern of the ship is known as the poop, they, and some adults as well, cannot help but giggle. Poop, of course, is also nursery verb meaning to defecate and a noun meaning fecal matter. But the two senses are from quite different sources. And complicating things, poop can also mean information, especially high-quality, reliable rumor from a knowledgeable source. (There are other sense as well, but for now I’m restricting this entry to these three.)
Poop, meaning the stern of a ship, comes from the Middle French pupe, and that in turn eventually comes from the classical Latin puppis, although the trail from Latin to French is muddy, perhaps passing through the Italian poppa or the Old Occitan popa. In Britain, the word is recorded in Anglo-Norman from 1338 in an inventory of a nautical storehouse:
Un grant ankre apelle le tyntawe, un pere vambras feble, un powpe ove le fforechastiell pour les ministraux partenauntz a la barge del hostiel notre tres redoubte (Seigneur le Roi), un petit barell de gonpouder le quart’ plein.
(A great anchor called the tyntawe, a pair of poor/damaged vambraces, a poop together with the forecastle for piloting/commanding belonging to the barge from the household of our very redoubtable lord king, a small barrel of gunpowder a quarter full.)
Tyntawe is mysterious; it may be a reference to the name of the foundry that made the anchor.
This nautical sense of poop appears in English by the beginning of the fifteenth century.
The sense meaning to defecate got its start as an echoic term, poop being likened to the sounding of a horn. This use has cognates in Dutch and Middle Low German and appears in English by the end of the fourteenth century, one example being in Chaucer’s The Nun’s Priest’s Tale. In the passage in Chaucer’s tale, the fox has caught the rooster, Chauntecleer, and is running away with him in his mouth. The entire farmyard is aroused and gives chase:
Of bras they broghten bemes, and of box,
Of horn, of boon, in whiche they blewe and powped,
therwithal they skriked and they howped.
It semed as that hevene sholde falle.(They brought trumpets of brass, and of box-wood,
Of horn, of bone, in which they blew and pooped,
And with that they shrieked and they whooped.
It seemed as if heaven should fall.)
By the end of the seventeenth century, this sense had evolved to also mean to fart. From the 1689 lexicon Gazophylacium Anglicanum:
To Poop, from the Belg. Poepen, to fart softly; both from the sound.
And the nursery sense meaning to defecate is first recorded in an 1882 Cornish dictionary by Frederick Jago:
Poop, or Poopy. To go to stool. (Said by children.)
(A few years later, Jago would mistakenly attribute this use of poop to “ancient Cornish.”)
The sense of information originates in the slang of the US Military Academy at West Point. There it meant information that was to be learned by rote, presumably to be regurgitated on demand. As such, it may come from the sense of blowing a horn, as mindlessly intoning words without any regard to meaning. From a glossary in the 1904 West Point yearbook The Howitzer:
Poop—To spec blind; to memorize completely.
Poop Deck—A small porch on the guard house used as a point of observation by the O.C. [i.e., Officer in Charge]
The inclusion of the naval poop deck is interesting, given the army source, and may or may not be related to the verb to poop. And there is this entry from the 1907 edition of the yearbook that explains spec and adds some additional information about what poop meant:
poop, v. To memorize a subject (including commas). Syn., spec.
poop-deck, n. The O.C.’s observation station.[...]
speck, v. (from Lt. “specio,” to look at). To absorb print, to commit something to memory without understanding it.
From West Point, it entered US Army slang, and the general sense of poop meaning information appears in print during World War II. From Charles Bond’s A Flying Tiger’s Diary, the entry for 25 February 1942. The Flying Tigers, officially the First American Volunteer Group, were American pilots who flew combat missions against the Japanese in China during 1941–42; the Flying Tigers were integrated into the US Army Air Forces shortly after US entry into the war:
We do things over here that would surely draw court-martials at home. Also we are flying aircraft that would be condemned back in the States.
We’re sending Bill Bartling to Kunming with complete poop on the situation here for the Old Man. We want some P-40 replacements that will not drop 200 RPM on one-magneto check before takeoff. Some of the pilots have gone to Cairo, Egypt, to pick up P-40E replacements for us. Hope they bring them here. But I have an idea that Chennault will re-equip the Third Squadron with them and rotate us and replace us with that squadron.
Sources:
Anglo-Norman Dictionary, s.v. powpe.
Bond, Charles R. and Terry Anderson. A Flying Tiger’s Diary. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M UP, 1984, 109–10.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 3398–3401. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.
Gazophylacium Anglicanum. London: E.H. and W.H., 1689, sig. T3v. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
“Glossary.” Howitzer. US Military Academy, 1907, 309.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2022, s.v. poop, n.2, poop, n.4, poop, v.2.
Jago, Frederick. W.P. The Ancient Language and the Dialect of Cornwall. Truro: Netherton and Worth, 1882, 322. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
———. An English–Cornish Dictionary. London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1887. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. poupen, v., poupe, n.(2), tintawe.
Nicolas, Nicholas Harris. A History of the Royal Navy, vol. 2 of 2. London: Richard Bentley, 1847, 476. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2006, poop, v.1, poop, n.1 and int., poop, n.2, poop, n.5.
“West Point Slang.” Howitzer. US Military Academy, 1904, 222.
Williams, Robert. Lexicon Cornu-Britannicum: A Dictionary of the Ancient Celtic Language. of Cornwall. London: Trubner, 1865, 40. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo Credit: BrokenSphere, 2009. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.