🧪 Study of excrement 💩 Obscene topics

scatology

9.9

A focus on gross jokes or ideas about poop

noun
/skəˈtɑlədʒi/

Offensive

: escatología

The professor's lecture on scatology included discussions of various cultural attitudes toward excrement.

Examples

Pure bovine scatology, plain and simple, and it would take a generous definition indeed to call it science.

Blog text (33)
He surprised me with a display of alliterative scatology that would confound your average Japanese student of the English language.

Fiction book (1998)
His novel is filled with scatology, often using crude humor to explore human nature.
In their analysis of scatology, the researchers examined how different societies treat and discuss bodily functions.

Compounds

bovine scatology

Specialized

9.9

A study of cow dung that shows what cows eat, their health, and effects on the land

How Preoccupied

obsession

262 5.1

scatology

Offensive

9.9

fascination

105 3.4

Surface Forms

scatology singular

scatologies plural

Morphology

scatology = scat (semi-transparent) = scat + ology

The form still points to excrement-related study, but the broader 'preoccupation with obscene or gross matters' sense is a conventional extension.

Etymology

Scatology also refers to a focus on rude or gross things because the first part, skatos, comes from a word for 'dung', and talking about dung became a way to talk about obscene or offensive topics. So, when a book, joke, or discussion spends a lot of time on excrement or gross material, we call it scatology.