Where did the phrase “built like a brick shithouse” originate? How can it possibly be considered a compliment? –Erik Smith, Hilton Head, South Carolina
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The book includes photos of privies constructed using a wide range of materials, including clapboard (by far the commonest), plywood, stucco, concrete, cedar shakes, logs, corrugated tin, scrap lumber, and of course brick. The brick shithouses are generally pretty impressive architecturally, but not even the most obtuse male is likely to see the spitting image of his ladylove therein–not unless she’s got a physique like a defensive line-man. They are, however, well built, especially in contrast to the flimsy wooden variety, and it’s strictly in this narrow sense that the phrase is usually applied to a woman. (To quote the relevant Commodores tune: “The lady’s stacked and that’s a fact.”)
You may think: I’ve heard of people being deaf to secondary associations, but this takes the cake. Well, no. The guy who first used “built like a brick shithouse” to describe a woman with a nice figure wasn’t thickheaded, just a smart-ass. From the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang we learn that: (a) the phrase and its euphemistic variants date back at least to 1903; (b) said variants replace “shithouse” with switch shanty, schoolhouse, slaughterhouse, or backhouse, among others; and (c) all were originally–and more sensibly–applied to men of solid or powerful build. When said of women, one 1938 source notes, the phrase usually meant a “heavy, cloddish, sexually unappetizing female.” But even in the 1930s a few wiseguys were applying it to attractive women, and in the U.S. that usage has now supplanted all others.
Apples and oranges? Probably, but as a demonstration of the march of progress the explosion of computing speed since the 1960s is hard to beat. The power of a supercomputer is commonly measured in “flops,” which stands for floating point operations per second. The Cray-1, the most famous early supercomputer (the first model was installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976), was capable of 133 megaflops (133 million flops). Early versions weighed over five tons, had a clock speed of 80 MHz, featured the equivalent of 8 MB of RAM, and cost about $9 million. In 1985 the Cray-2 was introduced, which could do 1.9 gigaflops (1.9 billion flops), operated at 244 MHz, had the equivalent of 2 GB of RAM, and cost about $12 million. For comparison, a typical PC bought in 2000 or 2001 uses a Pentium 4 processor with a clock speed of 1.5 GHz, benchmarks at around 1.8 Gflops, probably cost under $2,000, and fits under your desk. In short, it’s the rough equivalent of a 1985 supercomputer for one-six thousandth the cost.
