Talk:Shit stick

Uncommon title
This present English WP article entitled Chūgi 籌木 derives from the Japanese 籌木 interwiki. I compiled Japanese synonyms given there and Chinese synonyms given in the 厕筹 interwiki, and searched for these "shit stick" words in Google Books. The most commonly occurring Chinese and Japanese "exact words" are: However, none of these occur with their pronunciations (e.g., kanshiketsu "乾屎橛") in Google Books. D'oh!
 * "乾屎橛" 24,800
 * "籌木" 13,800
 * "屎橛" 5,920
 * "糞箆" 418
 * "廁籌" 280
 * "廁簡" 239

These exact phrases with pronunciations do occur in full Google Web search, but see WP:GOOG. For instance, 333 occurrences of chūgi "籌木", many (8 of first 10) copied from this article into WP mirrors and blogs/tweets; and 51 occurrences of kanshiketsu "乾屎橛", many The Gateless Gate'' kōan references and Buddhist dictionaries.

The Digital Dictionary of Buddhism has two entries If we follow WP:COMMON, what should the title be? Shit-stick? Chou/Chū 籌? Ganshijue/Kanshiketsu 乾屎橛? Keahapana (talk) 03:08, 23 August 2014 (UTC)
 * 乾屎橛 (pr. gānshǐjué, kanshiketsu, etc.) shit stick (used for toilet paper; or Chan term of abuse from Gateless Gate kōan)
 * 籌 (pr. chóu, chū, etc.) small stake or stick (used for counting, voting, calculating, i.e., salaka [Sanskrit: Śalākā, Pali: salākā, etc.] "stick"; or for toilet paper)

Page moved
I've expanded the original Chūgi stub by adding the "Scroll of Hungry Ghosts" mentioned in the text, replacing Japanese refs with English ones, adding Indian and Chinese terminology, etc. It still needs work and any help would be appreciated. Keahapana (talk) 01:27, 30 August 2014 (UTC)

Choice of words
I'm going to assume that the term "shit stick" was carefully chosen over "dung stick", or other terms, after a careful comparison of context and likely meaning suggested that the Japanese words were more closely equivalent to "shit" than to "feces" or "crap" or "dung". But it would be nice if there was some simple explanation of why they chose "shit" specifically, instead of some other word, or it might leave people wondering if someone just thought "shit stick" sounded funnier and so wrote a whole article using that phrase instead of something more "appropriate" (to modern Western sensibilities). I mean really...why "shit-stick"? AnnaGoFast (talk) 04:18, 27 February 2016 (UTC)


 * Surprised this hasn't been elaborated on any further haha. Poketama (talk) 05:10, 28 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I guess the reason given above is that the term shit stick is used in the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism. Poketama (talk) 05:12, 28 April 2023 (UTC)
 * It seems that 屎 is usually translated as shit, so the common chinese term 乾屎橛 is translated with shit. However, I've also seen these referred to in English as "poop stick". It can be challenging to translate words and get the same connotations and register. 193.119.80.59 (talk) 06:19, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Inaccurate image?
Use of this file may be in error or a joke from the original post-er since the sticks pictured appear to be arrows. Obviously, imagery on the actual article topic would be scarce. Perhaps it's best to make-do with this approximation. Cramyourspam (talk) 02:18, 17 October 2023 (UTC)