Jami and the Dirty Expression

Warning: This blog post contains swears. Don't read it if you can't deal with cusswords. I love, though rarely use, the expression "lost his shit." It always brings a smile to my face, because it is one of the very few idioms that I feel very aptly expresses exactly the situation someone is in. I think part of it is my mental image of how agitated you would have to be to literally lose your shit. I mean, dude, I've been angry, scared, sad and exhausted all in the extreme and sometimes in combinations, but never enough to have just crapped myself. But I get idea. I had a couple of those moments in my pregnancy especially when I (figuratively) lost my shit. It's sort of all those emotions tinged with the breaking of one's sanity - that's exactly what the phrase conveys. Now, I say "I just lost it" much more frequently. In my never humble and always correct opinion, "losing it" is a sort of briefer, momentary, more recoverable loss of one's emotional control. Losing "it" is like the step before one loses one's shit. Let's say I'm at the point where I am losing it: I'm crying (because that's what I do when any extreme emotion hits, it's biological, my eyes water when I'm mad, scared, happy, hungry) and I'm past the point of censoring what I say. And then you do that one thing, that is way beyond my abilities to cope. Now I'm not losing it, I've lost my shit. It's a loss of basic functionality, like comprehensible speech or common sense. It's when you're so whatever-you-are that you can't see straight. And this is one of those times when a swear is both appropriate and perhaps even necessary. "Bob lost his crap" doesn't do it for me. "Bob's going nuts" could mean he's have some silly fun. But "And then Bob totally lost his shit" guarantees that I will give Bob some space and not do whatever it was that came before that sentence in the story. And thus ends the day's lesson.