From Michael saying, “you look good, girl” just before taking a life, to Frank lamenting at the docks, “we used to make stuff in this country, now we just put our hands in the next guy’s pocket” there is no shortage of pullable soundbites that aren’t profanity-laced tirades (these aren’t really tirades, but “profanity-laced tirade” is such a common term it’s kind of hilarious).

To do The Wire more justice you’d have to pull some longer exchanges, such as these few I pulled from Bill Moyers Journal:

ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL: So for the time being, all teachers will devote class time to teaching language arts sample questions. Now if you turn to page eleven, please, I have some things I want to go over with you.

ROLAND “PREZ” PRYZBYLEWSKI: I don’t get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we’re teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?

TEACHER: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can’t.

PREZ: Juking the stats.

TEACHER: Excuse me?

PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I’ve been here before.

TEACHER: Wherever you go, there you are.

Or:

NAMOND BRICE: Like y’all say, don’t lie, don’t bump, don’t cheat, don’t steal or whatever. But what about y’all? What, the government, Enron, steroids? Yeah, liquor business, booze– the real killer out there? And cigarettes, oh shit! You got some smokes in there?

FEMALE TEACHER: I’m trying to quit.

STUDENT 2: Drugs paid your salary, right?

HOWARD “BUNNY” COLVIN (an ex-narcotics detective): Not exactly, but I get your point.

NAMOND BRICE: We do the same thing as y’all, except when we do it, it’s like, “Oh my God, these kids is animals!” It’s like, it’s the end of the world coming. Man, that’s bullshit. ‘Cause this is like, what, hypocrite? Hypocritical.

Or:

HOWARD “BUNNY” COLVIN: You put a textbook in front of these kids, put a problem on a blackboard, or teach them every problem on a statewide test and it won’t matter, none of it. ‘Cause they’re not learning for our world, they’re learning for theirs. And they know exactly what it is they’re training for, and what it is everyone expects them to be.

SUPERINTENDENT: I expect them to be students.

COLVIN: But it’s not about you or us, or the tests or the system, it’s what they expect of themselves. I mean, every single one of them know they’re headed back to the corners. Their brothers and sisters, shit, their parents, they came through these same classrooms, didn’t they? We pretended to teach them, they pretended to learn, where’d they end up? Same damn corners. They’re not fools, these kids. They don’t know our world, but they know their own. I mean, Jesus, they see right through us.

To really do The Wire justice, just watch the whole show. A few times. Available on DVD.

Still, I didn’t want to respond with “I’m from Durham, North Carolina, a predominantly black southern city and y’all are white fools for thinking “sheeeee-it” is something new,” as I’m in fact from the suburbs of Durham and am myself half white(/Asian), but as I was reading Jack Kerouac’s On The Road last night, I stumbled across the word and its particular pronunciation three times in the space of a page (200):

Yah, what’s good’s a ball, life’s too sad to be ballin all the time, said the tenorman, lowering his eye to the street. “Shh-eee-it!” he said. “I ain’t got no money and I don’t care tonight.”

…

We saw a horrible sight in the bar: a white hipster fairy had come in wearing a Hawaiian shirt and was asking the big drummer if he could sit in. The musicians looked at him suspiciously. “Do you blow?” He said he did, mincing. They looked at one another and said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s what the man does, shhh-ee-it!

…

The big Negro bullneck drummer sat waiting for his turn. “What that man doing?” he said. “Play the music!” he said. “What in the hell!” he said. “Shh-ee-eeet!” and looked away disgusted.

Not to suggest that On the Road premiered the term, but it does offer proof beyond the anecdotal that the elocution is (at least) fifty years old. So there you go, Slate folks: it ain’t nothin’ new. Sheeee-it.