When a person tells another to eat shit, the figurative meaning is automatically understood. The person doesn't like you. Or when someone is said to have "ate shit" it's understood that they fucked themselves up badly.

And this is what disturbs me about it: A friend was telling me about a story about his friend who put dog shit on a burger and fed it to someone else. This repulsive story had no left my mind in the last 6 hours, I cannot stop thinking about how horrible that is. Someone literally eating shit. The smell, the texture. He said the kid threw up, which I can imagine. How mental disturbing is that?

Then I got to thinking about how often I've heard the term, but never really thought about the actual process and reality of eating shit. Ugh, even thinking about it makes me nauseous.

Anyway, have you ever got past the symbolic meaning of a slang word to find the actual meaning something you can't believe you've not noticed before?

Eat shit, echhhh...

Eat shit, kiss my ass, etc. Freud had a field day with those. It's all anal-territorial circuit. Every language I've looked at has a plethora of insults involving ass and excrement. I bet it's been that way since the cavemen days, since before we had morals and complex social norms and all that, shit was probably the easiest way to degrade another human.

without the last question this text would be better in headshrinkers ..

and it has probably nothing to do with the unexistence of morals or social norms, more with the limited number of words and expressions at the beginning of the development of the human race. say our ancestors had 40 words which were mostly communicated by pointing at an object and screaming a special sound (word) repeatedly, then a bad thing included throwing shit like many primates do in zoos to visitors. on underdogs or predators as well. couldn´t find any etymologic background, but being hit in the face with feces , or falling down to the ground with your face in a turd seems to be like "eating" it.

yes there´s a german insult that made me thinking, literally translated it´s flatwanker. flat as being low, short penis etc. but then I heard a story about someone wanking off by rubbing his penis on his mattress, kind of raping it. and then I understood. another one is translated as fuck yourself into the knee, you will find out when you sit on your knees with a hard one ..