usually used intransitively. Martial (1.92.11) says: ("not your arsehole, for something that never shits isn't an arsehole") However, in the phrase below, from Catullus 36, it is transitive: ("Volusius's Annals, paper covered in shit") The prefixed form is transitive. Seneca describes the Emperor Claudius's final words, spoken after farting loudly: ("His last saying heard among mortals was the following, after he had let out a rather loud sound from that part with which he spoke more easily: 'O no, I think I've shat myself!' Whether he did or not, I don't know. He certainly shat on everything else.") Synonyms and metaphors Few synonyms are attested in Classical Latin, apart from a word , attested by the grammarian Festus (but nowhere else) in the meaning . The word comes much later. A euphemism which occurs in Petronius (116) is : ("We also had whole-wheat bread, which I prefer to white, since it gives you strength and also when I relieve myself, I don't feel pain.") The same euphemism is used in Petronius of relieving oneself of gas (see below). In the Romance languages is preserved unaltered in Sardinian and the southern Italian dialects, and with little alteration in Italian (cagare). It becomes Galician, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese cagar, in Vegliot Dalmatian kakuor, in French chier, and in Romanian as căcare (the act of taking a dump) or a (se) căca. (Feces are referred to as caca in French, Catalan, Romanian (besides căcat) and Spanish childhood slang, while Portuguese and Romanian use the very same word with the general meaning of anything that looks or smells malodorous or reminiscent of excrement.) German kacken, Dutch kakken, Czech kakat, Lithuanian kakoti, Russian какать (kakat), Icelandic kúka, Bosnian kakiti etc. are all slang words meaning "to defecate", most of them having roughly the same level of severity as the English expression "take a dump". : feces is the basic Latin word for excrement. Frequently used, it appears in most of the Romance languages. Etymology represents Indo-European *s-merd-, whose root sense was likely "something malodorous." It is cognate with German Mist (dung), Lithuanian "smirdė́ti" ("to stink"), Russian "смерде́ть" (smerdét, "to stink") and Polish śmierdzieć ("to stink"). Usage The word is attested in classical texts mostly in veterinary and agricultural contexts, meaning "manure". Cato the Elder uses it, as well as , while the Mulomedicina Chironis speaks of , "cattle manure". Unlike the English word "shit", could