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Donna Cassata, "Lindsey Graham: 'My Party Has Gone Batshit Crazy'", USN 2/26/2016:

Sen. Lindsey Graham is disgusted with the GOP's embrace of Donald Trump: "My party has gone batshit crazy."

In no-holds-barred remarks at a celebratory dinner Thursday night, the South Carolina senator and unsuccessful presidential candidate said the GOP has lost all semblance of sanity and predicted the party will suffer irrevocable losses in November if it backs Trump.

A set of video clips can be found here. The critical passage — which includes a dig at Hillary Clinton:

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Well look how far you've come.

The most dishonest person in America's a woman.

Who's about to be president.

How could that be?

My party has gone batshit crazy.

One result has been some interest in the word batshit, e.g. Fred Clark, "Where did the word-of-the-moment come from? To the Bat Cave!", patheos 2/28/2016. I have little to add to the discussion of chiroptera excrement, but there's a broader question about the meanings that have accrued over time to a half-dozen or so specific types of animal feces. In each case, I've quoted and linked to Wiktionary's gloss(es):

apeshit: "Out of control due to anger or excitement"

batshit: "Too irrational to be dealt with sanely"

bullshit: "False or exaggerated statements made to impress and deceive the listener rather than inform"

chickenshit: "Petty and contemptible; contemptibly unimportant"; "Cowardly"

dogshit: "Something disgusting, abominable, or useless."

horseshit: "Serious harassment or abuse"; "Blatant nonsense, more likely stemming from ignorance than any intent to deceive"

(There are a few marginal cases — whaleshit, wormshit — that I'm familiar with only in expressions like "lower than __shit".)

But there are lot of familiar animals whose excrement has no conventional value, as far as I know: catshit, cowshit, duckshit, goatshit, rabbitshit, sharkshit, sheepshit, snakeshit, …

Even some kinds of animal excrement that figure in common expressions have no independent usage. "Does a bear shit in the woods?" hasn't resulted in bearshit meaning (say) "Something too obvious to need saying". "Like shit through a goose" hasn't resulted in gooseshit meaning (say) "Something trivially easy to process".

As far as I can tell, the other languages where I'm competent to survey the relevant dictionaries don't have a similar set of conventionally differentiated meanings for different sorts of animal excrement. Thus the French Wiktionary page for merde offers many derivatives and expressions, but none of this type; and similarly the pages for Scheiße, stront, merda, mierda, etc. Though maybe this is just because the wikilexicographers haven't gotten so deeply into the subject in other languages.

Or maybe Anglophone linguistic culture really is uniquely full of shit. English certainly has (I think) an unusually large number of phrases and expressions involving that word:

are you shitting me?, (as) X as shit, (as) happy as a pig in shit, (not MODAL) VERB for shit, (when) the shit hits the fan, VERB the shit out of, VERBED to shit, ain't shit, and shit, bad shit, big shit, built like a brick shithouse, crock of shit, does a bear shit in the woods, don't shit where you eat, dumb shit, eat shit (and die), for shit's sake, for shits and giggles, full of shit, get/have xr shit together, give a shit, good shit, holy shit, hot shit, in the shit, king shit, know xr shit, like shit, like shit through a goose, like stink on shit, lose xr shit, no shit (Sherlock), not know jack shit, not know shit (from shinola), not know whether to shit or go blind, piece of shit, same old shit, same shit different day, scared shitless, shitcan (vt), shit-eating grin, shit a brick, shit fire, shit fit, shit for brains, shit happens, shit heap, shit hole, shit hot, shitkicker, shit list, shit on a shingle, shit or get off the pot, shit out of luck, shit pile, shit sandwich, shit show, shit stain, shit stirrer, shit storm, shit the bed, shit through a tin horn, shit ton, shit xr pants, shit-faced, shitass, shitbird, shithead, shitheel, shitload, shitting match, shitwork, shoot the shit, slicker than cat shit (on a linoleum floor), sure as shit, talk shit, the shit, think xr shit don't stink, tough shit, up shit creek (without a paddle), went (out) to shit and the hog ate him

Some additional animal-shit bibliography:

Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit, 2005

Jenny Neill/Lexie Kahn, "Dunged: On 'Bat Sh%t Crazy'", 3/21/2013

Mark Peters, "A slang word that's spreading like crazy", American Speech 2006

Mark Peters, Bullshit: A Lexicon, 2015

"Where did the phrase “batsh*t crazy” come from?", English Language and Usage 8/18/2011

And there's no animal excement involved, but I can't resist quoting another part of Senator Graham's speech that seems to have been overshadowed by the interest in his use of batshit:

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U.S. Senators have fought physically on the floor of the Senate at least once, but I don't think there's any precedent for a statement of this kind. One obvious conclusion is that Senator Graham should consider a career change — quoting Andrew O'Hehir, "The ballad of Lindsey Graham, Republican truth-teller and aspiring late-night comic, and the death of the GOP", Salon 3/3/2016:

Graham has the soul of a poet, or at least of a late-night TV host, which in terms of 21st-century culture is roughly the same thing.

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