Find a Tree

[00:00] One more thing we got coming at you this week, Coalson, do you have another Undegoogleable for us?
[00:06] I do, sir.
[00:14] Ooh, are we doing Undegoogleables?
[00:16] That was the play of it.
[00:17] Super excited.
[00:18] You told us we had to, sir.
[00:20] You said we signed up for it.
[00:23] In the end, it's going to be better and more true than Google can give you.
[00:30] Alright, so this week I've got, you know, we love idioms.
[00:35] We love trying to figure out the meaning and history of phrases.
[00:40] So this week I've got one, Don't Have a Pot to Piss In.
[00:46] Do you guys know anything about that phrase?
[00:51] It seems like it's pretty straightforward to prefer to chamber pots.
[00:56] And you're poor and you can't afford chamber pots.
[01:00] Am I thinking about this too simply?
[01:03] No, that sounds pretty good.
[01:05] I mean, but couldn't you always piss in something?
[01:10] Yeah, that's the hyperbole of it.
[01:13] I see. You're so poor you can't even get a pot.
[01:16] Although that does presume you have a house in some way, which is funny.
[01:23] Sure.
[01:25] Because otherwise you're just pissing on the street.
[01:28] Right. It would be weird if you were homeless and you carried around a pot of pee.
[01:34] Just to make sure you didn't pee on the street. It'd be awkward.
[01:38] Well, that was a whole skit on In Living Color, right?
[01:42] There was the guy that Damon Wayans played, the homeless guy that had his jars of...
[01:49] Jars of yours?
[01:51] You remember? You guys didn't remember this guy?
[01:53] This was a long time ago.
[01:56] I'll find some links.
[02:00] So the more intriguing part of the question, I guess, is when and where does this come from?
[02:06] Like, what, medieval?
[02:10] Yes, so you immediately went to chamber pots and I was thinking...
[02:18] I don't know, I just was thinking like the Great Depression.
[02:22] I always think of poor people then.
[02:24] So you think of poor people?
[02:29] It's the only time it mattered because that was America.
[02:32] That's right. It's an American phrase about poor Americans.
[02:37] No, okay. I like you. I like Chaucer. That's good.
[02:41] What about Pliny the Elder? Did they have chamber pots back then?
[02:49] I think they had... Did they have running water?
[02:54] You don't need running water for your pot.
[02:57] Yeah, when did chamber pots start? I mean, that's got to be like very ancient, I would think.
[03:04] I mean, because basically it's too cold to go outside if you're in a house, right?
[03:08] You just pee in the pot and then you throw it out the next day in the morning when it's warmer.
[03:13] Just stick it back under the bed, right?
[03:18] Or you could just throw it out at that moment.
[03:20] You could, but if it's cold, you could just sleep with the smell of urine under your bed.
[03:25] Right.
[03:33] No, I just envisioned like the reason you have the pot in the house, you know, it's like it's just keep it right next to the bed.
[03:39] You're right under the bed. You pee in it and then you worry about it in the next day.
[03:43] You're half asleep. It's cold out.
[03:45] Why would you save it, though?
[03:47] Nobody wants to. You don't want to go out to the outhouse.
[03:51] You've thrown it out the window if you have one.
[03:54] You just just walk out on your portico and you dump it.
[03:58] OK, let's say. Yeah. What if you don't have a window?
[04:02] I got to open the door.
[04:06] I'm so poor. I don't have a pot to piss in, nor do I have a window to throw it out of.
[04:11] Well, that was that's the rest of the phrase.
[04:14] Oh, really?
[04:15] No.
[04:17] Course, I wanted you later with that.
[04:22] You know the full phrase.
[04:28] That's that's the phrase.
[04:30] I'm so poor I have to go outside to pee.
[04:34] It doesn't have the same ring to it.
[04:36] No.
[04:37] Did anyone find the origin is that.
[04:42] So what did we decide on? Do we decide on Chaucer?
[04:49] Chamber pots.
[04:50] Yeah.
[04:52] Middle Middle Ages.
[04:55] Yeah. In Europe. Interesting.
[05:09] Are you getting the tannery stuff here?
[05:11] I am.
[05:13] I don't do I believe that.
[05:17] OK, so the idea is that urine was used to tan animal skins.
[05:25] So as a source of income, families would pee in a pot and then once a day take it to the tannery and sell it to them.
[05:35] And if you had to do this to survive, you were piss poor.
[05:40] But if you were super duper poor, you couldn't even buy a pot to collect your pee to go sell to the tannery.
[05:50] So you didn't even have a pot to piss in.
[05:52] You were piss poor.
[05:56] Are you on this blew my mind dot com?
[05:59] Yes.
[06:00] OK, so this makes me worried about this website because it goes this speaks to last week.
[06:07] Baths considered of a big consisted of a big tub filled with hot water.
[06:12] The men of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water.
[06:15] Then all the other sons and the men and the women and finally the children last of all the babies.
[06:20] But then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.
[06:23] Hence the saying don't throw a baby out with the bath water, which we learned last week was German.
[06:29] Oh, yeah. So I'm not sure I believe this site.
[06:32] I'm with you. I'm with you.
[06:35] See, under Googles actually does help us.
[06:38] English for students in medieval London.
[06:41] People did not have indoor plumbing.
[06:42] It was common to use a chamber pot as an indoor toilet.
[06:45] The chamber back could then be dumped out a window in the street, get her below.
[06:48] A person didn't have a pot to piss in was poor indeed.
[06:52] In medieval times, the word piss was not considered vulgar at all.
[06:56] It was until Victorian England, of course, that it was dense England. Thanks, Victoria.
[07:02] Does piss considered vulgar?
[07:06] We've said it a bunch on the show.
[07:09] I mean, it's not it's not something that you say.
[07:12] Like if you met the president, like you would say, I'm polite company.
[07:15] I mean, I'm not a normal president.
[07:19] But I don't have to hit like the explicit rating on the on this episode, do I?
[07:23] No, I don't think that will be necessary.
[07:26] This is harder to look up than previous.
[07:33] It's under Google.
[07:35] It's almost under Google.
[07:38] Nancy Friedman has not having a pot to piss in is another 20th century piss.
[07:42] Idiom distinctive blah, blah, blah.
[07:47] The OED calls it chiefly US.
[07:50] Really?
[07:52] And for the first citation, given the 1934 type script of Nightwood,
[07:56] a novel by Juna Barnes, that was published in 1936,
[08:01] this would fall more in with with your depression, Coalson.
[08:07] But it also does bring up another question that we've talked about before on the show.
[08:13] How long do these sort of terms live outside of literature before someone coins them?
[08:19] OK, yeah, I've got this one here.
[08:23] And this is going to blow your mind, Jason, not having a pot to piss in,
[08:29] which is sometimes completed by or a window to throw it out of.
[08:34] What?
[08:35] Yeah.
[08:40] And it basically it's a fancy way of saying that's a lack of porcelain
[08:50] days of indoor plumbing.
[08:53] People at chamber pots and hot toilets.
[08:57] They peed in during the middle of night.
[09:00] They slid under their beds and retrieved them in the morning.
[09:03] Look there.
[09:05] It is true that urine, which is acidic, was once used in tanning leather.
[09:10] It helped loosen the hair and tissue that remained on the skins and soften the hide.
[09:15] I was also using the production of dying gunpowder and for other purposes.
[09:18] But these uses all disappeared in the 19th century.
[09:21] This is the phrase dates back to 1905, but gives no source.
[09:26] So yeah.
[09:28] So interesting.
[09:31] Somehow someone didn't think of.
[09:35] So poor didn't have a pot to piss in in medieval England.
[09:38] We didn't think of it until America.
[09:39] That seems far fetched.
[09:40] That does seem far fetched.
[09:41] I'm more comfortable with it was a phrase.
[09:44] It kind of got lost.
[09:47] It re emerged during the depression because people are really poor.
[09:52] That's what I'm going to go with.
[09:56] That has absolutely no basis in fact.
[09:59] That's right.
[10:02] You're welcome.
[10:04] It feels truthy, though.
[10:05] It does feel truthy.
[10:09] Well, I'm perfectly happy having this be an American idiom, I guess.
[10:14] Sure.
[10:15] I want to be the author of everything, but also I don't want to be the
[10:18] author.
[10:19] Actually, the thought up don't have a pot to piss in because we're so
[10:23] poor.
[10:25] That one cuts both ways.
[10:26] It's funny.
[10:27] This is it's funny because this would seem straightforward, but it
[10:30] has become one of the hardest things to Google that we've ever done.
[10:33] So this colorful phrase deals with the houseware item common for
[10:38] centuries to say in itself dates only to 1905.
[10:42] However, broke people may have been more in the more distant past.
[10:47] There were weren't hordes of them unable to afford vessels of any
[10:51] kind to pee into, but there's no citation for that.
[10:56] Yeah.
[10:57] Well, you know, what strikes me, I mean, that's what, that's why the
[10:59] phrase is interesting, right?
[11:00] Because I mean, what is it?
[11:01] You, you can always pee in something.
[11:04] Right.
[11:05] Unless you're that poor.
[11:07] Well, well, but what, what is the something?
[11:13] Well, pot is ceramic and clay and you need an artisan for that.
[11:19] Right.
[11:20] Those used to be very, very expensive.
[11:22] Sure.
[11:23] Sure.
[11:24] I mean, glass jar.
[11:25] Glass is even more expensive.
[11:27] Yeah.
[11:28] So you can probably carve out a piece of wood.
[11:31] Right.
[11:36] Just go outside.
[11:37] Quit your bitch and go outside.
[11:43] Find a tree.
[11:44] Find a tree.
[11:48] It's interesting.
[11:49] I mean, that's the other part is you would have assumed that this
[11:51] would have been a European urban problem.
[11:54] Yeah.
[11:55] And the United States at that time was plenty of room to go
[11:58] outside and pee.
[11:59] It was still very rural outside of the Northeast, right?
[12:03] Sure.
[12:04] You would have thought that, yeah, people would just go outside
[12:06] and take a piss.
[12:07] I'm unfulfilled.
[12:11] So poor.
[12:12] Me too.
[12:13] Don't have a hole to poop in.
[12:14] I think it was, it was under Google this one.
[12:18] Wow.
[12:19] Were we just, were we just defeated?
[12:21] Yeah.
[12:22] Well, we're going to have to do some more research over the
[12:23] week, I think.
[12:24] I mean, I think that it looks like the first documented use
[12:28] of it.
[12:29] What probably wasn't a book in 1935.
[12:30] I just like some of our previous under Google was I really feel
[12:34] like this might've lived in the, you know, lived in the
[12:38] culture for a while.
[12:39] Makes way more sense to have it.
[12:42] Yeah.
[12:45] Chaucer Chaucer would have written it though.
[12:53] Yeah.
[12:54] All right.
[12:58] I think that's, that's about enough about pots to piss
[13:04] in.
[13:05] Already?
[13:06] Yeah.