There is a version that the Russian word “garbage” comes from the Latin hernia - “hernia”, and “to suffer from crap” used to mean “to suffer from a hernia”. We checked whether this is actually true.

Such versions can often be seen on various social networks. Some of them even come with detailed stories about how exactly the Latin hernia turned into the Russian “garbage”.

According to one of them, told on the Peekaboo, one day in the 19th century, a sailor got a stomach ache after loading boxes. But there was no Russian-speaking doctor nearby, only an Englishman. They explained themselves with gestures, and the doctor, advising bed rest, gave the sailor a note with a diagnosis, which he gave to the midshipman:

""Edit!" — the midshipman is surprised: “It says “some kind of bullshit!” The sailor goes to his room. When asked about the disease, he waves his hand: “Ah... Bullshit!”
In general, all the way home he sits on a bay with a cable and smokes. The sailors are talking to each other: “You see, a man is sitting and suffering from this crap!”
But a day before arriving in Kronstadt, the sailor dies from terrible abdominal pain. On everyone’s lips: “Someone died from bullshit...”
So gradually the unknown word spreads throughout the fleet and begins to reach the masses. Meanwhile, that same note was brought to one officer who knew English, in order to satisfy his curiosity. He said to the person who brought it: “This, father, is not bullshit! This is hernia - a hernia in our opinion.”.

One of the popular publications, which tells a similar version of the origin of the word “garbage”, came out in 2014 in Maxim magazine: the authors collected 20 words and expressions with an interesting origin story and included in the list the phrase “suffer from bullshit.” The magazine version sounded like this:

“... a common expression with a similar root - “to suffer from bullshit” - began to seem obscene. Hernia in Latin means “hernia,” and it was this diagnosis that kind military doctors most often gave to the children of wealthy townspeople who did not want to serve in the army. Every fifth city conscript in Russia at the end of the 19th century regularly suffered from garbage (the peasants most often could not afford garbage, and they were shaved much more actively).”

In English and Latin, the word hernia actually means “hernia.” But with Russian “bullshit” everything is not so simple, since it is a euphemism.

As Dmitry Dobrovolsky, a linguist and chief researcher at the Institute of Russian Language and the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, explained to “Verified,” the consonance of the Latin hernia and the Russian “garbage” is just a coincidence. Perhaps doctors who were professionally fluent in foreign languages could use this consonance for language games and jokes, but the etymology of the word is different. In Russian, the word "garbage" is one of a number of euphemisms used to replace the swear word "х**".

"Dick" - like that before was called the letter "X" in Church and Old Slavonic languages. From this name the letters, for example, is happening the word “poherit”, which meant to put a cross on something, since the letter “Her” looks like a cross.

The word “crap” originated in a similar way: from the name of a letter of the alphabet, because it was with this letter that the swear word “x**” was replaced.

“This is a widely known and practiced method of forming euphemisms,” explains Dmitry Dobrovolsky. - When a word that a person wants to avoid in speech because it is obscene is replaced by the first letter of that word. For example, if they say “she’s such a b...”, everyone will understand what they mean. Also, when they said “that’s a dick,” everyone understood that this first letter replaced an obscene three-letter word with the letter “x.”

According to the linguist, the assumption that the word “garbage” comes from the word hernia is extremely strange, because this word is formed according to the same principle as other similar euphemisms.

“There is a large word-formation nest with the word “dick”, which completely repeats the word-formation nests of all euphemisms and non-euphemisms of the word from which the word “her” comes. It can be shown by the example of another euphemism, for example, “fig”: “to screw up” - “to screw up”, “to screw up” - “to screw up”, “to shit” - “crappy”, “garbage” - “garbage”,” explains Dobrovolsky.

Thus, the word "garbage" does not come from the Latin hernia, and their consonance is a mere coincidence.