No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
TL;DR: swear words like "shit" usually emphasize the mood of a sentence rather than add new meaning, which is why "shit" seems to change connotation across your examples. Think like the word "very".
Traditionally in most European languages, the cycle of what is considered most offensive shifts between bodily functions (shit, piss), genitalia and sexual acts (cunt, cock, fuck) and religious profanity (hell, bloody), particularly against the Christian God. Some scholars define us as moving into a new cycle, where the most offensive words are slurs based on race, sexuality, or gender. These scholars speculate that this results in more willingness to experiment with already existing swear words of the 'traditional' categories since they are considered less offensive in comparison.
Swear words are almost always used euphemistically and in set phrases. Some scholars go as far as to argue that swearing is only euphemistic and words used literally do not count as "swearing". In fact, much of swear word usage can be classified as an intensifier, which is a word or short phrase that sort of heightens the already existing mood of the sentence but doesn't explicitly change the meaning. Using shit as an example, "Shit, the bread's gone stale again." In this example, you can also see shit being used as a sort of mood marker, since it is reasonable to assume out of context that the bread going stale might be desirable to the speaker. In this case, the "shit" marks the stale bread is actually bad as well as intensifying the mood as compared to, say "oh darn, the bread's gone stale again."
This part is a bit of speculation on the origin of set phrases like "ain't shit" or "the shit" and I haven't actually read any scholarly literature on this topic specifically. You can see similarities between set phrases like "this is the shit" and "this is the stuff" and "that's the spot". It seems like this is a construction common in the English language to express that something is pleasurable. Whether this is what caused the "this is the shit" set phrase or whether the "this is the shit" set phrase caused the construction remains to be seen. "Ain't shit" is definitely somewhat different because it probably comes from African American Vernacular English (AAVE). While I would argue that "the shit" could be AAVE in origin as well, I do think it has roots in non AAVE English, whereas "ain't shit" is grammatically AAVE.
If you're interested in reading more, I recommend The F Word by Jesse Sheidlower and Holy Sh*t by Melissa Mohr.