piss poor / not a pot to piss in

“An Old Woman at a Window Emptying a Chamber Pot,” anonymous, between 1700–24

18 September 2023

The phrases piss poor and not a pot to piss in date to the first half of the twentieth century and received a big boost when they entered soldier’s slang during the Second World War. They are unusual for slang terms in that some of their earliest citations are from modernist literature rather than the language of the streets.

Of the two, not a pot to piss in is the older and relies on the metaphor of a chamber pot. It is first recorded in 1934 in Djuna Barnes’s manuscript for her novel Nightwood:

My heart aches for all poor creatures putting on a dog and not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it from.

The use of piss as an intensifier is recorded a few years later, in Ezra Pound’s Cantos in the form piss-rotten. This canto (number 69) is supposedly in the voice of John Adams writing to Thomas Jefferson. It discusses the fears of an aristocracy emerging in the United States and of Alexander Hamilton’s plan for the federal government assuming the Revolutionary War debt of the states, which was a significant shift in economic power from the states to the federal government:

To T. Jefferson:
“You fear the one, I the few.”
In this matter of redeeming certificates
that were used payin' the sojers
vignette in margine
King, Sam Johnson of N. Carolina
Smith (W.) S. Carolina, Wadsworth (Jeremiah
J. Lawrence, Bingham, Carrol of Carrolton
gone piss-rotten for Hamilton

Piss-poor is a combination of the two uses, using the metaphor underlying not a pot to piss in with piss- as an intensifier. The earliest use I know of is from a diary kept by Thomas Hirst Hayes, who was held as a prisoner-of-war by the Japanese in the Philippines. His diary entry for 13 March 1943 reads, in part:

A few days ago the Nips asked for a dental officer to go to Lipa where they have a bunch of American prisoners building an air field with this whole dam [sic] bevy of panty waist dental officers here who havn’t [sic] contributed a goddam thing since the war began, they order out Bob—a man who has been through Bataan and Corregidor with us, went thru the hellish days of Cabanatuan, recently recovered from beri beri and yellow jaundice. That makes the second time they have sent our “fighting men” out to maintain their own dam lotus eating no good bastards whose prime object in this mess is to survive. Their reason this time was that Bob was the Junior. Bob like a good soldier said nothing. I was not asked anything about it, and I still maintain the Commands’ right to order as they see fit, but I insist someday in letting the world know how piss poor were some of our outfit, how useless and disgusting were our “politicians and diplomats” and “kind old gentlemen” Bob preferred to go than be classed with the “panty waists.”

Another early use if piss-poor, one that combines WWII military experience and poetic literature is in MacKinlay Kantor’s 1945 Glory for Me:

“It’s not my dish,” Fred Derry said.
“I’m much obliged to you;
You’ve certainly been decent to me—
All a guy could ask.
But—Well, I guess I know
I’m piss-poor in a job like this.
It's trivial, it’s dull:
I hate it more and more each day.
It's not your fault.
I’d rather go.

That’s it, a rather straightforward and obvious origin. But that hasn’t stopped people from wildly speculating. Of recent vintage is the belief that the phrases come from the practice of impoverished people collecting and selling their urine for use in tanning animal hides, and that those who were really, really poor, that is piss-poor, didn’t have a pot to piss in.

It is true that urine, which is acidic, was once used in tanning leather. It helped loosen tissue and hair that remained on the skins and softened the hide. Urine was also used in production of dye and of gunpowder and for other purposes. But these uses all but disappeared in the nineteenth century with the advent of modern chemistry and the ability to produce artificial substitutes cheaply and efficiently. So this old practice is not the origin of the phrase piss poor or not having a pot to piss in, which both appear long after the practice of using urine in industrial production had ended.

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Sources:

Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood (1937). New York: New Directions, 2006, 106. Archive.org.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. piss-, pfx.

Hayes, Thomas Hirst. Diary, 13 March 1943, 100–101. Archive.org. 

Kantor, MacKinlay. Glory for Me. New York: Coward-McCann, 1945, 183. Archive.org.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2006, s.v. piss-poor, adj.; December 2006, s.v. pot, n.1.

Pound, Ezra. “Canto 69” (1940) The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1972, 407.

Image credit: Anonymous, in the school of Frans van Mieris the Elder, 1700–24. Wikimedia Commons. UK National Trust Collections ID: 1151396. Public domain image.

gallium / eka-

Crystals of pure gallium

15 September 2023

Gallium is a soft, silvery metal with atomic number 31 and the symbol Ga. The metal is widely used in electronics. Its name arises out of nationalist pride, a fit of egomania, or more likely both.

Gallium’s existence was predicted in 1871 by chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, the inventor of the periodic table, by its position on that table, and he provisionally dubbed the element eka-alumini. Mendeleev coined the combining form eka- from the Sanskrit meaning “one.” Gallium sits one place below aluminum on the periodic table. Eka- has subsequently been used to denote elements whose predicted existence has yet to be experimentally confirmed.

The existence of gallium was demonstrated in 1875 by French chemist Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran through spectroscopy, making it the first discovery of an element predicted by the periodic table. It was Lecoq who gave it the name gallium:

Les experiences que j’ai exécutées depuis le 29 août me confirment dans le pensée que le corps observé doit ètre considéré comme un nouvel élément, auquel je propose de donner le nom de Gallium.

(The experiments that I have performed since 29 August confirm my thought that the observed body must be considered as a new element, to which I propose to give the name of Gallium.)

Lecoq claimed to have named it after his native France, or Gallia in Latin. Others have claimed he named it after himself; gallus is rooster or cock in Latin. Lecoq specifically denied this eponymous etymology, but it seems likely that he created the name with the dual meaning in mind.

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Sources:

Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Paul Emile. “Caractères chimiques et spectroscopiques d’un nouveau métal, le gallium, découvert dans une blende de la mine de Pierrefitte, vallée d’Argelès (Pyrénées).” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l'Académie des sciences, 81, 20 September 1875, 493–95 at 494. Bibliothèque Nationale de France: Gallica.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. gallium, n., eka-, comb. form.

Sztejnberg, Aleksander. “Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834 - 1907), prominente científico ruso. Referencias a sus grandes logros científicos en la literatura entre 1871 y 1917” (“Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (1834 – 1907), Prominent Russian Scientist. References to His Great Scientific Achievements in the Literature between 1871 and 1917.”) Revista CENIC Ciencias Quimicas. 49, 2018, 1-13. EBSCOhost Academic Search Ultimate.

Photo credit: Foobar, 2004. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

knock yourself out

Muhammad Ali delivering a third-round, knock-out blow to Brian London, 6 August 1966

13 September 2023

Knock yourself out is a slang expression that is defined in this glossary of Ohio State University slang that appeared in the Columbus Sunday Dispatch on 24 November 1940:

Knock Yourself Out: To outdo oneself, put forth conspicuous energy, try to do numerous things at once. Used sarcastically to deride meager effort of another, i.e., “Don’t knock yourself out.”

Contrary to what one may think, the slang phrase has nothing to do with boxing, although one can find literal uses of the phrase relating to that and other contact sports, like American football and rugby. Instead, the metaphor is one of working yourself to exhaustion. The Oxford English Dictionary and Green’s Dictionary of Slang both mark the phrase as US in origin, but the earliest citation I have found is from the Port Adelaide News in South Australia on 17 April 1924:

Young Wife—“I’ve just polished it, and it looks so nice. I thought you’d like it.”

Young Husband—“Like it? When I’m afraid to walk on it? I don’t know why you want to knock yourself out polishing floors so a man can’t walk on ‘em.”

The earliest American use that I have found is from ten years later in the Las Vegas Daily Optic of 29 March 1934. That’s Las Vegas, New Mexico, not the more famous city in Nevada. The article in question is about caring for a terminally ill friend:

You have known, perhaps, what it is to watch long at the death bed of a dear friend.

[…]

Your friend kept telling you that you would knock yourself out, that there was nothing you could [do] for the sufferer.

Knock yourself out is often uttered as a means of telling some to go ahead and diligently try to do something, implying the task is either unimportant or has little chance of success. We see this usage in the Pittsburgh Courier of 23 April 1938 describing temperance battles in Los Angeles:

The wets and the drys are battling here. The wets have it. But the drys are gaining ground. Knock yourself out. The wets are simply lush heads, and the drys are the tea hounds.

By the end of the 1930s, the phrase starts appearing with much more frequency, in particular among musicians. Here is one from the Buffalo Evening News of 25 November 1939:

Johnny Green is probably the busiest young maestro in radio.

He does three commercial broadcasts on the three major networks over 200 different stations each week. But that’s only the beginning.

He also conducts for special dance dates, is ever busy with new compositions, and constanly [sic] improves his technique as a piano soloist.

“Why do you knock yourself out this way?” a friend asked.

“You’ve got to do it or else you become just another bandleader,” Johnny replied. “Besides, I enjoy the work, believe it or not."

And this from the Sul Ross Skyline of 28 February 1940, the school newspaper of the teacher’s college in Alpine Texas:

For the benefit of you school teachers who are getting the swing fever, the following definitions will clear up a few miss-understandings [sic]: “Knock yourself out;” “In the groove; “Getting your kicks.” Translated to English as meaning the high and happy feeling one gets while listening to swing tempo.

So by 1940, this phrase which appears to have gotten its start in Australia some fifteen years earlier, was in common slang use throughout the United States.

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Sources:

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. knock out, v.

Morris, Earl J. “Grand Town Day.” Pittsburgh Courier (Pennsylvania), 23 April 1938, 21/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Musician’s Kicks.” Sul Ross Skyline (Alpine, Texas), 28 February 1940, 2/4. NewspaperArchive.com

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. knock, v.

Stailey, Bob. “Campus Slanguage Goes Wacky.” Columbus Sunday Dispatch (Ohio), 24 November 1940, Magazine Section (no page numbers; image 85/4). Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“Three Programs Keep Green Busy.” Buffalo Evening News (New York), 25 November 1939, 5/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Vivian, Walter[?]. “Along the Banks of the Gallinas.” Las Vegas Daily Optic (New Mexico), 29 March 1934, 2/2. NewspaperArchive.com. The scan of this page is very poor, and I have guessed at much of the punctuation and the author’s first name.

“Week In…Week Out.” Port Adelaide News (South Australia), 17 April 1924, 8/2. NewspaperArchive.com.

Photo credit: unknown photographer, 1966. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

picnic

“A Pic-Nic Party,” 1846, oil on canvas, by Thomas Cole. Men, women, and children sitting on blankets and eating and drinking in a bucolic setting. One man is playing the guitar.

18 February 2022

(12 September 2023: added discussion of the phrase lynching picnic)

The English word picnic ultimately comes from the French pique-nique, although it may have come via German. The French word originally referred to a meal where everyone paid for or contributed their share of the food, but later came to mean a meal eaten outdoors. The pique comes from the verb piquer, to stick or sting, to bite like an insect. The nique means “nothing whatsoever.” It also had the meaning of a small coin, but that sense had largely disappeared by the time pique-nique was coined in the late seventeenth century. So, a pique-nique would be a light, informal meal, where one would leisurely pick at and nibble food.

But the proximate source for early appearances of the English word may have been the German Picknick, which is also borrowed from the French. And the earliest recorded use of the word in English is in a German context. It is in a 1748 letter by Philip Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield, to his son, then living in Dresden. The elder Stanhope makes reference to a picnic his son had attended there:

I like the description of your Pic-nic; where, I take it for granted, that your cards are only to break the formality of a circle, and your Symposion intended more to promote conversation than drinking.

Folklore has the origin of this word as referring to a lynching party for Black people in the American South, deriving from the phrase pick a n[——]r. This is incorrect. The word’s origin is in Europe, has no racial overtones whatsoever, and, as we have seen, long predates the practice of lynching Black people. There are seemingly innocuous words that have racist origins (cf. grandfather clause), but picnic is not one of them.

This idea may have arisen from the existence of the phrase lynching picnic, which is not meant literally. The phrase uses picnic metaphorically to describe a mob; there is no food or drink involved, nor is the term applied exclusively to the lynching of Blacks. The earliest use of lynching picnic that I’m aware of is typical of the phrase’s use. From the Buffalo Evening News of 6 December 1881:

FATHER McCARTHY’S ASSAILANT

Almost a Lynching Picnic in Staid Old Massachusetts

GREENFIELD, Mass., Dec. 7—David McMillen, who shot Rev. Father McCarthy, reached Greenfield at 6.40 [sic] last night in charge of an officer. It was feared that some of the enraged parishioners of Father McCarthy would try to lynch the prisoner, and the train was stopped some 100 rods below the depot and the prisoner, with two officers, was taken into a carriage and driven rapidly to the jail.

Stories about white people picnicking at a lynching are often accompanied by photos of crowds of white men, women, and sometimes children gathered around the hanging corpse of a Black man. The phrase lynching picnic appears in the caption of one such photo published in the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, of 16 August 1930. The photo is of the hanging of two Black men, Thomas Shipp and Abraham Smith, in Marion, Indiana on 7 August 1930. No food or beverages are depicted in the photo. The caption, titled “American Christianity,” reads, in part:

Christian America must know that all the world points with scorn at a country that spends millions to christianize [sic] other countries while at home the barbarians hold their lynching picnic at regular intervals while the nation’s lawmakers sit idly by and offer not one measure to break up the worst crime in the history of the world.

The history of lynching is a horrific chapter in American history, but despite the use of the phrase lynching picnic, the practice of gathering for an outdoor meal has never been strongly associated with murder, nor is there any evidence of white people bringing food and beverages (other than maybe liquor to lower inhibitions against violence) to such murders.

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Sources:

“American Christianity” (photo caption). Chicago Defender, 16 August 1930, 1/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Father McCarthy’s Assailant.” Buffalo Evening News (New York), 6 December 1881, 1/4. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers. [The article which inexplicably (typo?) bears a dateline of 7 December appears in the 6 December issue of the paper.]

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2006, s.v. picnic, n., adj,, and adv., picnic, v.

Stanhope, Philip. “Letter CLXVII” (29 October 1748). Letters Written by the Late Right Honorable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to His Son, Philip Stanhope, vol. 2 of 4. London: J. Nichols, et al., 1800, 135. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: Thomas Cole, 1846. Brooklyn Museum. Public domain image as a mechanical reproduction of a public domain work of art.

louse / lousy / louse up

Human head louse (male), Pediculus humanus capitis

11 September 2023

A louse is an insect of the genus Pediculus that feeds off a variety of animals. And species of lice are often specific to their host species or even parts of the host species. For instance, Pediculus humanus is the species that typically infests humans, comprising two sub-species: Pediculus humanus humanus (body lice) and Pediculus humanus capitis (head lice).

The word louse comes from a common Germanic root, and in Old English its form was lus. We can see the word in one of Ælfric’s sermons, written in the closing years of the tenth century, in a passage about the plagues delivered upon Egypt prior to the Exodus:

Ða sende se ælmihtiga tyn cynna wita ofer ðam ðwyran cyninge. and ofer his leode. ær ðan ðe he þæt folc forlætan wolde; Moyses, ðurh Godes mihte, awende eal heora wæter to readum blode, and he afylde eal heora land mid froggon. and siððan mid gnættum. eft mid hundes lusum, ða flugon into heora muðe and heora næsðyrlum.

(Then the Almighty sent ten kinds of plagues to the perverse king and to his people before he would release that people; Moses, through God’s power, turned all their water into red blood, and he filled all their land with frogs, and then with gnats, afterward with dog’s lice, which flew into their mouths and nostrils.)

The verb to louse, meaning to infest with lice, dates to the mid fifteenth century. But in American slang in the early twentieth century, the phrase verb to louse up, came to mean to spoil, to mess up, a metaphor of degrading something by infesting it with the insects. We can see the transition from the literal to the metaphorical in the early 1930s. The following passage, from a story about a World War I veteran returning home in the Kansas City Star of 8 March 1931, in uses louse up literally:

“But listen,” he said, lowering his voice. “I feel lousy. I feel as if I’d louse up the whole place. Wouldn’t want to do that. I’ll get out of this uniform tomorrow and burn the damned thing.”

Three years later we see the metaphorical use in a baseball column in the New York Daily News of 23 July 1934, written by novelist and sportswriter Paul Gallico:

I do not see why I should louse up Prof. Frick’s interesting and beautifully written column with any further comment of my own. It contains more information than a week of my own. Stet!

And entertainment reporter and impresario Ed Sullivan used the phrase in a 1938 gossip column:

The Milton Berle–Jack Oakie feud rumors in “Radio City Revels” are a publicity gag … They’re the best of friends … Oakie sent him a box of golf balls for a present with this notation: “Hope these louse up your game.”

That’s the noun and the verb, and the adjective lousy also dates to the medieval period. It appears in the latter half of the fourteenth century in both literal and metaphorical senses. We see the literal in William Langland’s c.1377 poem Piers Plowman, in a passage describing the appearance of the character Covetousness (a.k.a. Sir Harvey):

And thanne cam Coveitise, I kan hym naght descryve—
So hungrily and holwe Sire Hervy hym loked.
He was bitelbrowed and baberlipped, with two blered eighen,
And as a letheren purs lolled hise chekes—
Wel sidder than his chyn thei chyveled for elde;
And as a bondeman of his bacon his berd was bidraveled;
With an hood on his heed, a lousy hat above,
In a (torn) tabard of twelf wynter age;
But if a lous couthe lepe, (leve I), the better.

(And then came Covetousness, I cannot describe him—
So hungrily and hollow Sir Harvey looked.
He was bitter-browed [i.e., grim] and thick lipped, with two bleared eyes,
And his cheeks hung down like a leather purse—
Well below his chin they trembled from old age;
And like a serf his beard was beslobbered with bacon;
With a hood on head, a lousy hat above it,
In a torn cloak twelve winters old;
But if a louse could leap, I believe, it would be better off.)

About a decade or so later, Geoffrey Chaucer uses lousy in The Friar’s Tale. His use of the phrase marks the transition from literal to metaphorical; the “lowsy jogelour” can be read as either (or both) infested with lice and unskilled. The passage is a conversation between a summoner and a demon:

“Ye han a mannes shap as wel as I;
Han ye a figure thanne determinat
In helle, ther ye been in youre estat?”

“Nay, certeinly,” quod he, “ther have we noon;
But whan us liketh we kan take us oon,
Or elles make yow seme we been shape;
Somtyme lyk a man, or lyk an ape,
Or lyk an angel kan I ryde or go.
It is no wonder thyng thogh it be so;
A lowsy jogelour kan deceyve thee,
And pardee, yet kan I moore craft than he.”

(You have a man’s shape as well as I;
Have you then a definite form
in hell, where you are in your usual condition?”

“No, certainly,” said he, “there we have none;
But when we like we take on one,
Or else make it seem to you that we are so shaped;
Sometimes like a man, or like an ape,
Or like an angel I can ride or proceed.
It is no miraculous thing though it be so;
A lousy illusionist can deceive you,
And by God, yet I know more craft than he.)

We don’t see the original, literal meaning of lousy so much anymore. That’s probably because in our modern, ultra-hygienic society of disinfectants, soaps, and regular bathing, lice, except for the occasional outbreak among schoolchildren, aren’t that big of a problem. But because the spelling of the word has remained the same and because the metaphorical meanings haven’t strayed too far from the literal, the etymology of the word is still easily recognizable.

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Sources:

Ælfric. “Dominica. In media quadragesime.” Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies: The Second Series. Malcolm Godden, ed. Early English Text Society S.S. 5. London: Oxford UP, 1979, 111.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Friar’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 3.1458–68. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website.

“Compensation and the Home Fires.” Kansas City Star (Missouri), 8 March 1931, C1/8. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Gallico, Paul. “Prof. Frick on Umpires.” Daily News (New York), 23 July 1934, 36. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2023, s.v. louse up, v. lousy, adj.

Langland, William. The Vision of Piers Plowman (B text, c. 1377), second edition. A.V.C. Schmidt, ed. London: Everyman (J.M. Dent), 1995. passus 5, lines 186–94, 71.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. louse, n., louse, v., lousy, adj. and adv.

Sullivan, Ed. “Hollywood.” Augusta Chronicle (Georgia), 8 January 1938, 4/6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Image credit: Gilles San Martin, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.