Bizarre Origin Stories For Strange Idioms

Someone would have to sit out in the graveyard all night (“graveyard shift”) to listen for the bell; thus, someone could be “saved by the bell” or was considered a “dead ringer”. They also had lead cups and when they would drink their ale or whiskey. The combination would sometimes knock them out for a couple of days.

When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Americans 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.

Enjoy reading and share 23 famous quotes about Piss Poor with everyone. While this colorful phrase deals with a houseware item common for centuries, the saying itself dates only to 1905. However broke people may have been in the more distant past, there weren’t hordes of them unable to afford vessels of any kind to pee into. However, the expression piss-poor is recent and has nothing to do with tanning.

Where Did “Piss Poor” and Other Phrases Come From?

They would be walking along the road and here would be someone knocked out and they thought they were dead. So they would pick them up and take them home and get them ready to bury. They realized if they were too slow about it, the person would wake up. Also, maybe not all of the people they were burying were dead. So they would lay them out on the kitchen table for a couple of days, the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. That’s where the custom of holding a “wake” came from.

Ezra Pound invented piss-rotten in and we’ve since had piss-easy , piss-weak , piss-elegant , piss-awful and other forms. “Dead ringer” was first used in the late 19th century, with “ringer” referring to someone’s physical double and “dead” meaning “absolute” (as in “dead heat” and “dead right”). A “ringer” was a better horse swapped into a race in place of a nag.

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It was raining like crazy, and my wife said- “look at all of the poodles in the street”. My mom said- “Of course, it’s been raining cats and dogs”. Eskimoes used to save urine, and use it for washing hair. I knew a lady in Denmark with two children born in Greenland.

Folks weren’t collecting their urine, then selling it to large commercial tanneries . A similar concept is the “stirrup cup,” which is a drink handed to a departing guest when his feet are in the stirrups — that is, when he is already seated upon his horse and about to leave. “Stirrup cup” has mostly dropped out of common usage, except among huntsmen who continue to use the term to describe the offer of an alcoholic beverage either as riders are about to depart or when they first arrive. It also serves as the term for the actual drinking vessel being proffered, which is a cup that traditionally should have no base so it cannot be set down without spilling its contents and therefore must be drained by the person it’s handed to.

piss poor / pot to piss in

They really felt special when that happened and when company came over they even had a rack in the parlor where they would bring out some bacon and hang it to show it off. That was a sign of wealth and that a man “could really bring home the bacon.” They would cut off a little to share with guests and they would all sit around and “chew the fat.” Like I said, they took their yearly bath in May, but it was just a big tub that they would fill with hot water. The man of the house would get the privilege of the nice clean water. Then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Thus, the saying, “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water,” it was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.

• They were laid out on the kitchen table for a couple of days and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up.
• Port out, starboard home was the only way for a gentleman to travel.
• 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”.

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 phrasepiss poorornot having a pot to piss in, which both appear long after the practice of using urine in industrial production had ended. The origin of “on the wagon,” meaning “to abstain from alcoholic drink,” is the most contentious etymology among the four phrases mentioned. Its first known print sighting dates to 1901, when a variant of it appeared in a book improbably titled Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Men who took the pledge were supposedly vowing they’d sooner mount the water wagon and drink its contents than permit demon rum to pass their lips.

England is small and the local folks started running out of places to bury people. So they would dig up coffins and would take the bones to a “bone-house”, and reuse the grave. When reopening these coffins, 1 out of 25 coffins were found to have scratch marks on the inside and they realized they had been burying people alive… So they would tie a string on the wrist of the corpse, lead it through the coffin and up through the ground and tie it to a bell.

The exact analogy behind this expression—found asshort end of the stickby the 1930s but dating all the way back to the 1500s in earlier forms—has been lost. One of the reviewers who wrote that you were a piss-poor substitute for Kiara and that the entire system is saddened by the loss of her from the show. I was just telling her that if she doesn’t return soon and they leave your clumsy ass in, the show’ll be closing prematurely for sure. “We’re a team. I’m not asking them to leave so you can tell me of whatever piss-poor problem you’ve landed yourself in.”

Where did “piss poor” and other sayings come from?

“Since England is so old and small they started running out of places to bury people. So they started digging up some coffins and would take their bones to a house and re-use the grave.” “Most people didn’t have pewter plates though, they all had trenchers, that was a piece of wood with the middle scooped out like a bowl.” Primitive drainage systems in use in the 17th century could be overwhelmed by heavy rainstorms, leading to gutters overflowing with debris that included dead animals. As stated earlier, though early marriages were common among the royals of that era, they were far from the norm among ordinary citizens. Granted, there might have been a few such early unions, but the practice was not as portrayed in this e-mail, which states that “Most people married young, like at the age of 11 or 12.” Since England is so old and small they started running out of places to bury people.

When you came into the house you would notice most times that the floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, that’s where the saying “dirt poor” came from. That was fine but in the winter they would get slippery when they got wet. So they started to spread thresh on the floor to help keep their footing.

Trenchers started to receive pewter or wooden underplaques in the 14th century. Though these underplaques were sometimes used as plates to eat from, by custom the more common use called upon them to support a bread platform for food until sometime in the 16th century. This statement would hold true in 11th and 12th century England, when it was common practice for every member of the great households to bed down on the reed-strewn floor of the main hall. (Some of the more fortunate had flock mattresses to cushion them.) Northern Europe was at that time experiencing warmer-than-usual temperatures, which made such sleeping arrangements livable.

• The idiom appears in Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, published in 1936, so it does predate piss-poor.
• I’m always a bit suspicious of explanations that involve people being buried alive I always thought saved by the bell came from boxing.
• Since England is so old and small they started running out of places to bury people.
• Canopied four-poster beds were the province of the well-to-do, not the ordinary folk.

These horses would have to resemble each other well enough to fool the naked eye, hence the term came to mean an exact double. Sometimes remains were dug up, and sometimes what was left was pushed aside, with the newcomer loaded in on top of whoever was already there. Most folks accepted this practice, provided the old bones remained near the church. When bones were disinterred, they were taken to a charnel house, in a process termed second burial.

Words having to do with excretory functions are routinely used in colloquialisms meant to communicate meanings of “little or no value” (e.g., “shit for brains,” “not worth a fragrant fart,” and “I don’t give a crap”). “Piss poor” is akin to “dirt poor,” with both piss and dirt serving as figurative terms for items of little worth rather than as words meant to convey literal possession or use of urine and soil. As well, the earliest known print sighting of “piss poor” dates only as far back as 1946, which also helps puts the kibosh to the notion that the term was born of the process of tanning animal hides. 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.

They would what is a deposit slip the stew for dinner, leaving leftovers In the pot to get cold overnight and then start over the next day. The acid in the urine combines with the base in the lye to form a type of soap, and that helped to wash the wool. I’m always a bit suspicious of explanations that involve people being buried alive I always thought saved by the bell came from boxing. Since the boxing has to stop when the bell rings at the end of the round, if someone is getting a right pasting, they can be saved by the bell in the sense there is a brief respite between rounds. 2)I hired someone to paint my car but they did a piss poor job. Of course, having a skeleton in the closettoday doesn’t literally refer to a rotting corpse hiding under your sweaters.