Shit happens

Toilet paper roll with two cardboard tubes.

"Shit happens" is a common vulgar slang phrase, used as a simple existential observation that life is full of unpredictable events, either "Así es la vida" or "C'est la vie". The phrase is an acknowledgment that bad things happen to people for no particular reason.^[1][2]

The origin or earliest use of the phrase is uncertain. In a review of The Yale Book of Quotations (2006) by Fred Shapiro, The New Yorker critic Louis Menand observed that it was "extremely interesting to know, for instance, that the phrase 'Shit happens' was introduced to print by one Connie Eble, in a publication identified as UNC–CH Slang (presumably the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), in 1983."^[3]

In popular culture

• In the 1992 film Captain Ron, Kurt Russell's character, Ron Rico, uses the phrase during a monopoly game as a blunt way to teach minors the risks of gambling.

• Along with several other humorous stunts of similar type, the 1994 film Forrest Gump, contains a fictional account of an event involving Forrest Gump which allegedly led to the birth of the phrase. When he was running across the country, a bumper sticker designer asked him about whatever Gump wanted to say so he could put it on a bumper sticker and sell it; at the time, Forrest stepped on dog excrement, as the other guy said to him "Whoa! Man, you just ran through a big pile of dogshit!", then Gump said "It happens", the guy replied, "What, shit?", Gump replied "Sometimes"; and the slang was created.^[4]

See also

• Chicken shit
• Murphy's Law

References

Look up shit happens in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.