From 1960s Scouse slang to Nicolás Otamendi: the murky origins of 'shithousery'

The murky origins of 'shithousery'

"Where and when was the term 'shithousery' first used, and do other languages have a word for it?" asked Brian in 2022. To understand the modern phenomenon, we must first trace the word from which it derives.

According to the Guardian's John Ashdown, who wrote about the S-word during the 2018 World Cup, it can be traced back to Scouse slang used in the 1960s. The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang defines "shithouse" as "an extremely unpleasant individual" and "a coward", and it had certainly reached the east Midlands by the 1970s.

In Duncan Hamilton's book Provided You Don't Kiss Me, he quotes Brian Clough's penchant for the word: "The phone rang. 'Where are you, shithouse?' asked Clough. (He used the word 'shithouse' as frequently as other people use 'please' and 'thank you'. 'It's an affectionate term,' he'd explain — though he didn't always use it that way)."

Jack Charlton was equally fond of the phrase. In 1990, during a prescient observation about how the media might ruin Paul Gascoigne, he said: "Journalists … they're all shithouses, them." A couple of years earlier, he said there was no room for "shithouses" in his Republic of Ireland squad. John Hartson, then at Arsenal, was sent off against Middlesbrough in January 1997 after calling the referee, Mike Reed, "a shithouse".

But the neologism "shithousery" only emerged in the 21st century. "The word does not (yet) feature in the Oxford English Dictionary," writes lexicographer John Williams, "but taking the ever-excellent Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang as a baseline, we see that his earliest citation is from 2014, with Nicolás Otamendi as the alleged culprit."

As this is a Twitter citation, Williams looked back further. "The first football personality accused appears to be Arsène Wenger in 2011, the accusation coming from the Guardian's own Daniel Harris." The word became a wider part of the football lexicon in the 2010s.