Street voices
Hugues
·
United States
"Shitting the bed, meaning to fail something miserably. Yo, I heard James is in the hospital, what the hell happened? Ah, well you know how he started going skating way more frequently? Well he tried to do a really hard trick the other day and totally shit the bed, so yeah."
What it means
Means to fail badly in a way that feels bigger, messier, and a lot more humiliating than a normal mistake. People use it for botched performances, public screwups, or moments where someone completely falls apart under pressure. Crude, yes, but that is why it hits. The phrase sounds like disaster already halfway through saying it.
Usage examples
"James tried a stupidly hard skate trick in front of everyone, wiped out hard, and ended up in hospital. Totally shitting the bed, poor guy."
"The new quarterback shitted the bed completely in the final minute against the Eagles, two interceptions inside two plays and a fumble that the entire stadium watched roll backwards down the field like a runaway watermelon at a Texas state fair."
"I had been rehearsing the presentation for three weeks and I still shitted the bed in front of the regional director from Dallas, mixed up the quarter numbers, dropped the laser pointer twice and ended with a slide titled Thank You for Two Hundred Years."
Where it comes from
Shitting the bed in the figurative sense of failing badly under pressure entered American English in the nineteen-eighties, originally as locker-room talk among sports teams describing a player who choked during a crucial game. The phrase makes graphic use of the worst possible household accident as a metaphor for messy public failure, and it has spread from athletic banter to business journalism, project meetings and political commentary. The British and Irish equivalents bottling it and crapping out exist in parallel, but the American form has its own particular comic violence that no euphemism quite matches.
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