A joke I’ve heard from Mock The Week.

Went to a zoo. It had one animal. It was a shih zhu.

The joke is that Shih Zhu, a kind of animal, sounds like Shit Zoo, and a zoo with one animal, a small and domesticated animal, would be a pretty bad one.

But, while speakers of American English can hear Shit Zoo and understand what is meant, the adjective they would more likely use is Shitty.

This came to mind when I found a video from a British comedian named Russell Howard called “Why are girls’ toys patronizing and shit?”

I knew Russell Howard is a British comedian, because Mock The Week, but until I heard the delivery of the title sentence, I did not fully understand the point being made. Girls’ toys are bad in the way that a one-animal zoo is bad, and being patronizing is a way in which they are bad. (A point I am fully willing to accept and endorse.)

The American parse would be that girls’ toys are patronizing, and there are a number of other adjectives applicable that the speaker doesn’t want to enumerate. In this case, the sentiment of the unspoken adjectives is negative, but this is not necessarily an aspect of the sentence. One could say something like “Porsches are all pretty and shit” and have the list of unspoken modifiers tend to be positive. Synonyms include “et cetera”, “and the like”, “and all the rest” and so on.

[Evidently, “and shit” is in the OED](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/410310/whats-the-origin-of-and-sht, dating back to the 1950s.

And in American usage, shit tends to be negative, this is not always true. “That’s the shit” is said to praise a good thing.

Which is why the sentence inspired me to write. I was expecting “Girls’ toys are patronizing and all sorts of other things” and got “Girls’ toys are patronizing and really really bad”.

Which makes it an unintentional pun, I think.

If you have any questions or comments, I would be glad to hear it. Ask me on Twitter or make an issue on my blog repo.