I curate a newsletter that keeps up to date (or at least attempts to keep up to date) with Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang, and “type shit”, also spelled as “type s”, “type shi” or “type shiii”, threw me for a loop when I found it on this teacher’s ban list.
Apparently, the young-uns are saying it to affirm whatever was said before. Here’s an example given by a Reddit user:
“I can DM you”
“type shit”
Here’s an example from Urban Dictionary:
Guy: Shawty where you from?
Girl: Venezuela
Guy: Ohhh, type shit
After a lot of puzzling, watching TikToks and reading Reddit threads, my hypothesis is that it is short for “that’s the type of shit I’m talking about”. I have not been able to find any actual evidence for this, but I do think it fits well with the meaning, and it makes sense.
(Of course, “type shit” can also mean “that kind of stuff”, as in “that’s some Stanger Things-type shit”. This is not the meaning we are discussing here.)
Here’s a TikTok video showing how versatile the phrase apparently is
And here’s a TikTok with someone saying the phrase originated in Memphis in 2013 (unconfirmed, obviously)
I use Urban Dictionary to date slang (not perfect, but at least something), and the oldest entry for Type Shit used in this way on Urban Dictionary is from 2019.
Heddwen Newton is an English teacher and translator. She is fascinated by contemporary English and the way English changes. Her newsletter is English in Progress. 1900 subscribers and growing every day!
We (Black and Browns of a certain class) were using the original form in the Bronx of the 70s, so it had to be at least a decade old by then.
Question: how do you understand the relation between this meaning of “type shit”, and the other meaning (which you exemplified by saying “Stranger Things type shit”)? Are they independent? Is one parasitic on the other? Do you have any sense of chronological priority between the two?
In both cases, “type shit” is short for “type of shit” and means “kind of stuff”. I’ve just had a look at Green’s dictionary of slang, and the first written example of someone using “shit” to mean “stuff” dates from 1934. (https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/2jwxjqa)
I would conjecture that saying “this type of shit” has been understandable to people ever since the shit = stuff meaning came about. However, the “that’s some *reference*-type shit” phrasing feels new to me. You’d have to do a Corpus search to see how far back you can find examples.
In other words, the two phrases are both examples of “type shit”= “kind of stuff”, and therefore are very much related. “Type shit” on its own is very new, but my conjectured origin “That’s the type of shit I’m talking about” is clearly much older, and if it came before or after the “that’s some *reference*-type shit” I don’t know. I feel like the second phrase is newer, of the two, but that’s just based on my own intuition.