"eye shit"

In the course of looking for some content for my class - because you know, I think the students deserve at least that much - I ran across this dialect survey. One of the survey questions was "What do you call the gooey or dry matter that collects in the corners of your eyes, especially while you are sleeping?"

Turns out "sleep" was well liked by a sizable proportion of respondents (37.78%). The next largest group preference (10.68%) was for the childishly gross "eye booger". However, my personal favorite term was "eye shit", which accounted for .45% of the responses and was distributed as in the map above (yellow points).

I find it strangely comforting that "eye shit" had a showing at all. It's not a conscious distain for the whimsy underlying more popular terms like "sleepy seed" (1.67%) or "sand" (7.77%). It's just that sometimes I go through periods where am seized with a very strong urge to dispense with the verbal frippery.

Or maybe I'm just, at heart, a true vulgarian.