[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have was
that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those
people.

Dan Quayle

 

The most destructive force in the universe is gossip.

Dave Barry

 

One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide
stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork. 

Edward Abbey

 

Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen. 

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

 

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is
absolutely fatal. 

Oscar Wilde

 

There are more of them than us.

Herb Caen

 

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Piss-poor

 

An item circulating online under the title Interesting History claims, “They
used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot
and then once a day it was sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to
survive you were ‘piss poor’.” This screams of folk etymology, except that
the piece is in its intention merely a mischievous attempt to deceive its
readers. However, as with other tongue-in-cheek suggestions about origins, a
grain of truth exists in it. Urine has been widely used in many parts of the
world in the preparatory stages of tanning, in particular to help remove the
hair from hides before applying tanning agents.

 

The Romans, for example, collected urine for this purpose systematically and
even put a tax on it. The most famous taxer was the emperor Vespasian in the
first century AD. The long-gone French public pissoirs were given the name
vespasiennes as a direct link to him. Vespasian’s son is said to have
objected to the disgusting origin of the tax revenues, to which in legend
his father replied pecunia non olet, money doesn’t smell, a tag that from
time to time is still employed to argue that money isn’t tainted by its
origins.

 

However, the expression piss-poor is recent and has nothing to do with
tanning. The current state of research suggests that it may have been
invented during the Second World War, because the first examples in print
date from 1946. Though it is still classed as low slang by dictionaries, its
mildly unpleasant associations have become blunted by time and familiarity.

The origin is straightforward. Piss began to be attached to other words
during the twentieth century to intensify their meaning. Ezra Pound invented
piss-rotten in 1940 (distasteful or unpleasant, the first example on record)
and we’ve since had piss-easy (very easy), piss-weak (cowardly or pathetic),
piss-elegant (affectedly refined, pretentious), piss-awful (very unpleasant)
and other forms.

 

Piss-poor began life in a similar figurative sense for something that's
third-rate, incompetent or useless, as it does in this recent example:

 

Larkin’s letters, wrote Philippe Auclair, writer and broadcaster, were “very
funny, very beautiful, and very sad; the grace of an angel, the precision of
a geometer, and the short-sighted, intolerant piss-poor idées fixes of a
provincial buffoon”.

The Spectator, 27 Nov. 2010.

 

People who know the idiom so poor he didn’t have a pot to piss in, sometimes
in the fuller form ... or a window to throw it out of, might wonder if this
is the origin. The idiom appears in Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, published in
1936, so it does predate piss-poor. However, it’s a graphic literal
reference to poverty; as piss-poor was first used in a figurative sense,
it's unlikely to have been influenced by the older idiom. In fact, the
literal sense of extreme poverty for piss-poor didn’t come along until a
couple of decades later.

 

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Before winning the election in 1860, Abraham Lincoln lost eight elections
for various offices.

 

Robert Todd Lincoln, son of President Abraham Lincoln, was present at the
assassinations of three US presidents: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley.

 

The first President to ride in an automobile was William McKinley. After
being shot, he was taken to the hospital in a 1901 Columbia electric
ambulance.

 

George Washington's false teeth were made of whale bone.

 

George Washington was deathly afraid of being buried alive. After he died,
he wanted to be layed out for three days just to make sure he was really
dead.

 

Washington's second inaugural address was 138 words long.

 

George Washington who commanded the Continental Army as a four-star general
was promoted posthumously to the position of six-star "General of the Armies
of Congress" by an order of Jimmy Carter, who felt America's first President
should also be America's highest military official.