"Dirtville" isn't that bad a name, eh? · 2:53pm Oct 1st, 2013
Many of you may have remembered how Chancellor Puddinghead, as depicted by Pinkie in the Hearth's Warming Eve Episode, famously proclaimed the name of the new land shall be "Dirtville".
In modern English, while dirt can refer to unclean substances, it can also mean something neutral such as soil or earth. However, it is lesser known that the word dirt did have a much more unsavory root in history.
In Middle English, dirt was "drit". The i and the r later changed places in a process called metathesis in linguistics. The Middle English word in turn came from Old Norse, which was also spelled drit. It further derived from Proto-Germanic *dritą, *dritō.
They all mean the same thing: shit. In fact, cognates of dirt in other Germanic languages, like Norwegian (dritt) and Icelandic (drit), still mean "shit". In fact, we can even go further: the Proto-Indo-European roots, *dhreid-, *treidh-, mean "to have diarrhea/to defecate". The vulgar role of the word would later be taken over by the word, you know, shit, which also has its family of Germanic cognates (Scheiße, anyone?). But to be precise, shit (and all its Germanic cognates) refers to solid excrement, while drit means excrement in general. You can easily see why if you go back to the former word's PIE roots (*sḱeyd-, *skeyd-), which mean “to split, divide or separate”.
Aha, maybe the use of the word "dirt" is a genius reference to the use of manure in farming? (Even though we have seen nothing of such dirtiness in the show). It would also be quite reasonable (not to mention hilarious) to consider the "excrement" meaning to still be extant back in the time before the formation of Equestria. It would also nicely compliment with the dung age peasant stereotype.
Anyway, I had to resist putting a pun in the title, however tempting it is, lest it spoils.
From Robin Hood: Men in Tights (The only Robin Hood movie I know of with a British actor in the title role.)
So when did dirt stop meaning shit and start meaning soil? Somewhere around when we started incorporating latin words?
1388086
1388169 Well, it happened way later than the first language contact between Old English and the Romance languages. Latin influence had been present on the British Isles long before the arrival of Anglo-Saxons. The Norman Invasion have strengthened Romance influences on English and brought new Latinate words into the English corpus, but in many case it could take another couple centuries or so for the domino effect of word/meaning replacement to take place.
In this case, the "excrement" meaning of drit was still extant in Middle English (c.14th century, some 300 years after William the Conqueror). But during the centuries that follow the word came to carry a derived meaning of "mud" in some attestations, presumably via the route "excrement" > "dung, manure" > "mud, soil".
The metathesis occurred just before the standardization of English spelling brought about by Early Modern printers, and it was in the form dirt or durt (now obsolete), circa 1600s, that the meaning "unclean substances" gradually gained precedence over "excrement". The latter role got taken over by words like the Latinate feces and other Middle English words like dung and shitel (later shortened to shit).
The older meaning of "dirt" (from drit) hasn't been lost entirely, though it turns up in odd places.
The young adult book series Warriors (or Warrior Cats) uses "dirt" this way frequently, in the sense of "excrement". Here's an exchange where one feral cat mentions his disdain for the lives of housecats:
A hated leader named Darkstripe is called "Dirtstripe" behind his back, and they definitely aren't talking about "soil".
Doubt the books' readers would know the etymology but it's still an interesting choice of terms for a book series aimed at pre-teens.
1390094 True, the OED in fact still lists the "excrement" sense at its 3rd meaning, but as you said, it is often applied in informal occasions and is marked as such in most dictionaries. It might even be independent modern reinventions in some cases, which would not be surprising. The use of dirt to mean "excrement" has become dialectal simply because there are so many "rival" words meaning the same thing but are unambiguous.
Speaking of using the word in addresses, drit was already used in personal insults as early as the 13th century,
showing that talking shit about someone has demonstrably ancient origins (and never gets old).