Pecunia non olet origin1/6/2024 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. The idiom appears in Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, published in 1936, so it does predate piss-poor. or a window to throw it out of, might wonder if this is the origin. 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”.Īmericans who know the idiom so poor he didn’t have a pot to piss in, sometimes in the fuller form. 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: 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 began to be attached to other words during the twentieth century to intensify their meaning. Though it is still classed as low slang by dictionaries, its mildly unpleasant associations have become blunted by time and familiarity. 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. However, the expression piss-poor is recent and has nothing to do with tanning. 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. The long-gone French public pissoirs were given the name vespasiennes as a direct link to him. The most famous taxer was the emperor Vespasian in the first century AD. The Romans, for example, collected urine for this purpose systematically and even put a tax on 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. However, as with other tongue-in-cheek suggestions about origins, a grain of truth exists in it. Can you offer real clarity?Ī It certainly might be a folk etymology, except that the piece is in its intention merely a mischievous attempt to deceive its readers. If you had to do this to survive you were ‘piss poor’.” This screams of folk etymology. As his illness worsened, and feeling the approach of death, the emperor is supposed to have called out ' Vae, puto deus fio ('Dear me, I think I'm becoming a god').Q From Bob Fleck: 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. A few months short of his seventieth year Vespasian fell ill. The custom of turning emperors into gods began with Augustus. All that remains of are three Corinthian columns. 81-96) and dedicated to both Vespasian and Titus. The temple was completed by his brother the emperor Domitian (r. Titus died two years later and he, too, was deified. ![]() 79-81) commissioned a temple to be raised to him in the Forum. Vespasian was deified after his death and his son and successor Titus (r. On account of this story, a public urinal ( orinatoio) came to be known in Italy as a vespasiano. The phrase is still used to argue that the value of money is not tainted by its origins. When Vespasian's eldest son and heir, Titus, questioned whether this was an honourable way of making money his father is said to have held a coin up to his son's nose, asking if it smelt of anything! Titus had to conclude that ' pecunia non olet' ('money has no smell'). Vespasian introduced a tax on the collection of urine, a valuable commodity in that it contains ammonia, which was used to clean clothes. How such an object came to be named after a Roman emperor is an interesting story and it starts off with a tale told by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (69-130) in his book De Vita Caesarum (Lives of the Caesars). He built the largest amphitheatre in the world he also gave his name (albeit involuntarily) to the public urinal. ![]() The legacies of the emperor Vespasian (r.
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