Importing Piss?

What does the Thursday Night Martini Gang talk about when it’s gathered round the table at Mo Mong. The same thing we’ve been talking about for 23 years: advertising. This past week’s conversation didn’t start there, though.

It began with Bill Large, Rob Schoenbeck and me discussing the origin of the word ‘pissed,’ meaning ‘drunk.’ (First-timers are frequently amazed where these things start – and end – so wait for the end of this post, eh?)

We floated our ideas about the origin of this slang and Rob volunteered to look it up when he got home. He reported an unusual lack of success yesterday:

“After searching through To Coin a Phrase, Dictionary of English Colloquial Idioms, Guinness Book of Curious Phrases and the Oxford English Dictionary plus a cursory search of the web. I am ‘pissed off’ in being unable to find the origin of the term.”

Unbelievably, it's true as Rob says: the term ‘pissed’ for ‘drunk’ doesn’t show up in the OED – at least not in my old edition. However, there's hope in a varied library.

Eric Partridge, renowned pursuer of slang, wrote A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. (My copy is middle-aged: 1961.) Partridge notes that ‘pissed’ or ‘pissed-up’ means very drunk, a “low term,” possibly military, from the 20th Century. Please do share Partridge’s wonderful phrase, “so drunk he opened his shirt collar to piss” with your friends.

It's barely conceivable that ‘pissed’ comes from drinking too much at Piss-Pot Hall, “A tavern at Clopton, near Hackney, built by a potter chiefly out of the profits of chamber-pots...” Partridge says Piss-Pot Hall comes from around 1710-1830...which seems pretty distant from its 20th Century use.

Most likely, ‘pissed’ meaning drunk came into usage the UK - first - from Australian soldiers in World War 1. Researching ‘piss,’ it seems to be a fairly historic and pretty well-known Australian slang term for a bad brewski – and that’s how I discovered Piss Beer.

Piss is the brand name of a contract-brewed beer, produced by Geelong Brewing of Victoria, Australia, for the Pi55 Beer Company P/L of Melbourne. It was introduced in 1998 at the Great Britain Hotel in Richmond (the one in Oz, dear).

Now you’ll find this amazing: public support has been strong and the business has expanded and exported since the beer was introduced, but major distributors continue to avoid the brand, “perhaps due to ‘piss’ being slightly vulgar and also a derogatory Australian slang word for poor-quality alcoholic beverages.”

Regard the Piss Beer website: Now you can enjoy the great taste of Piss and Piss Weak regardless of where you live. The Piss Pak was developed in response to the massive demand we have received both in Australia and overseas for these distinctive brands, and we now offer delivery to your door anywhere in the world.

See? This is about advertising. Import Piss! Everyone should order a Piss NOW. Read “The Unabridged History of Piss” on the company’s site and see if you don’t agree.

I wonder if they’ll ship to Houston. Bill has got this neat beer-bottle-opener-on-a-ring that’d work a treat on Piss bottles. (Uh, that didn’t sound right, did it?)

Thanks to the Martini Gang for the entertainment, and apologies to Horse Piss Beer for ignoring domestic in favor of foreign brews – but it’s a potential import right? And we all know that market is hot.