Piss

As is common with excretory and copulatory terms, piss has acquired many idiomatic slang usages in modern varieties of English, although it is generally eschewed in formal print. The usage note in the Oxford English Dictionary , “not now in polite use,” reminds us that it previously had a wide general currency. It is recorded in Scripture in both the Wycliffe and King James versions of the Bible, 1388 and 1611 respectively: “men that sit in the wall, that they may eat their own dung and drink their own piss” (II Kings 18:27 in the King James Bible, 1611). It was also used in medieval medical texts, such as Lanfranc’s Cirugerie (“Surgery,” ca. 1400): “til that he pisse blood” (62). The old word for the dandelion was pissabed on account of its diuretic properties, and the general French term is still the related pissenlit . With the subsequent separation of registers in English, the word has become inappropriate in professional discourse. Despite being a coarse four-letter word, piss is not Anglo-Saxon, the earliest recorded instance being 1290, well into the Middle English period. It is derived from French pissier but has no ulterior Romance root, and is often explained as being “echoic” or “onomatopoetic.” The word was also borrowed into German, Swedish, and other Germanic languages, originally as a euphemism.

Chaucer uses the term, but chiefly in the tales of the less respectable characters, such as the Miller and Reve. However, the water conduit near the Royal Exchange in London set up by John Wels, the lord mayor, in 1430 was graphically termed the Pissing Conduit because of its thin stream. In an expansive gesture in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 the King announces: “I charge and command that of the City’s cost / The Pissing Conduit run nothing but claret” (IV vi 4-5). A pissing while was a common demotic phrase for a small interval of time in Elizabethan times (also found in Shakespeare ), and in Restoration drama piss! was a vulgar expletive. Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of Historical Slang (1937) lists no less than forty entries for the term, most of them idioms. Proverbial usages include “Everything helps, quoth the wren, when she pissed into the sea” (1623, quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs ).

Francis Grose included in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) such graphic idioms as pissing pins and needles for “to have a gonorrhea,” piss-burned for “discoloured,” and piss-proud for “to have a false erection.” Other major authors of the eighteenth century using the term were Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, while Lord Byron dismissed what he called “Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry” (Rawson 1991, 301). Thereafter, in common with other coarse terms, the word’s currency diminished in the face of Victorian censoriousness. Thus the euphemistic form pee , recorded from about 1788, began as nursery talk, also being used of animals, and has since developed a wide currency, despite its origins being transparent. The same pattern is found in piddle , described by Grose (1785) as “a childish expression; as ‘Mammy I want to piddle.’” He also notes that piddling means trifling.

Most of the current idiomatic uses, such as the variations of piss off meaning “to annoy, to be annoyed, to leave unceremoniously, or to be told to go away,” date only from World War II. However, T.E. Lawrence antedates these with the abrupt direction “You piss off, Pissquick” in The Mint (1922, 186). From the 1950s and later come the phrases to piss about, to piss away money or profits, and odd British formations such as pisser (a bar), pissily (feebly), piss artist (a drunken incompetent), and to take the piss (tease, pull someone’s leg). Hugh Rawson includes a considerable volume of recent American usage in his Dictionary of Invective (1991), while Timothy Jay’s analyses of student speech showed that the word did not have a high taboo rating and its frequency was virtually identical for male and female students (1992, 143-51). Alice Walker created a remarkable instance in The Color Purple when Shug Avery comments: “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it” (1983, 167). Generally speaking, there is currently little difference between American and British English in terms of degree of taboo and breadth of currency. However, although both varieties have the euphemistic form peed off , only the American has the “double” euphemisms teed off and kissed off . In other global varieties, both Australian and South African English tend to follow the British pattern, with few original inventions: thus only Australian English has the picturesque phrase to piss in [someone’s] pocket for “to try to ingratiate oneself.” This is probably a survival of to piss down one’s back , recorded by Grose in 1785 in the sense of “to flatter.” Nevertheless, the word has not recovered its general use in formal print.