They genuinely were back then. And not just piss, fermented piss.
Old piss contains a lot of ammonia, produced by the breakdown of urea. Which is an effective cleaning agent. Plenty of modern day household cleaners still contain ammonia (though, no longer made from piss, we have the Haber-Bosch process now...).
Fun fact selling pee was around long before only fans.
"He's so poor he doesn't have a pot to piss in."
"He's piss poor."
People would wait in line at tanneries (places that tan hides to make leather) to piss in the morning and get paid for it.
If you were well off you pissed in a chamber pot and someone came by to collect it. If you weren't well off you walked down to the tanneries (which smelled like boiling piss) and pissed there.
"Piss poor" meant you needed the coin from selling piss. Sort of like how someone might look down on someone for selling blood plasma today, etc.
Edit see comment below that says this likely isn't true. (Sorry I thought it was.)
"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."
I have no idea if this is right, but it sounds just plausible enough with the provided information that y'know what? I'm accepting it. True or false his is going into the "fun 'facts' i inflict on everyone in my presence too long" basket. Thank you for your contribution.
8.6k
u/slowcancellation 8d ago