New old word: Dejecta
Dejecta. Noun. Latinate and Victorian term for poop, crap, excrement.
From The Phantom of Liberty by Luis Buñuel
The three books about human waste under review here operate at the intersection of embodiment, technology, sensibilities and permissible speech. The matter of two of them…is “sanitation,†itself a euphemism for excrement, or, depending on the venue, feces, dejecta (a wonderfully Latinate and Victorian term), pooh or poop, crap or, finally, shit. The latter vulgarity is increasingly the term of choice among developing-world sanitation professionals, so that we can be sure what we’re talking about. Occasionally this “sanitation†also includes urine or household grey water, but the real problem is the third of a pound of microbe-rich merde that each of the almost seven billion human bodies eliminates daily.
Both books attack a conspiracy of silence, an “if we do not speak about it, maybe it will not exist†approach…That attitude reinforces ignorance, prevents effective technical response, and kills. The international public health and development literature takes insufficient interest in excrement. And even nosy anthropologists often overlook the answering of the calls of nature.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
April 8th, 2009 at 20:51
Shit, this is some article. But I agree, we humans and the city planners are in denial as to where our wastes end up.
Here in Canada, there are five great lakes where the drinking water comes from, and there had been countless incidences of contaminated tap drinking water.
Myself, also think what goes into what I drink, so I abandoned the bottled water in favor of boiling my own, although there’s no boiling advisory going on.
In a farm in the Philippines which I used to visit as a boy decades ago, proper toilet/sewage/sanitation was lacking. Imagine having farm and domestic animals as comapanions/dessert gobblers (pardon!) during one’s most private moment(s). And afterwards, you get to feast on a lechon. There, you go.