As in - “that toxic sludge pile sure does stink somethin’ FIERCE! Peeeee-yoooooo!”
I was sure Cec would have answered this nugget somewhere (like he did with the “OK” conundrum), but my (admittedly limited) search skills have yielded nada.
Ideas?
It sounds like an emphasised ‘pyew’ when you say it out loud.
It doesn’t stand for anything. Its usually written just the way you wrote it in the sentence. Its just a noise one makes when smelling something awful. Argggg.
Probably related to “phew”, a “vocalic gesture expressing weariness, etc., attested from 1604”.
By the way… Back around 1982 I had an idea for a movie trailer. (My friends and I liked to make super-8 films. I thought it would be fun to make a trailer, and possibly make a film afterwards.)
Travelling shot going up a hallway and up some stairs to the attic. The camera approaches a large trunk.
Narrator: What’s in the old hope chest up in the attic? Something old. Something new. Something borrowed… something FIERCE!
Chest opens and bright light spills out. Cut to black.
There was also this exchange:
Me: I’ve got to piss something fierce!
Friend: Don’t let it out!
This page traces it back to Sanskrit:
This one makes not of the PIE root *pu, meaning “rot, stink” as the origin of words such as “putrid” and "pus."This appears to be a very ancient word.
This web page traces it back to Sanskrit:
This could be a very ancient word.
ESHT: This page traces it back to Sanskrit
That page is written by a loon. Well, to be fair, English and Sanskrit are both descended from Proto-Indo-European, so they do have a large number of cognate words, and it wouldn’t surprise me if English “pyew” or “phew” and Sanskrit “puuya” really were related, by common descent from P.I.E *pu.
However, it makes no sense to say that the English words are derived from Sanskrit, any more than it would to say that you are descended from your great-uncle. Sanskrit and English are on two separate linguistic branches of an original common root. (There are in fact a few English words directly derived from Sanskrit ones, such as “orange”, but most of the examples given on that page are simply cognates derived from a common source.)
Uh-huh.
English and Sanskrit are ancient cousins - both are Proto-Indo-European. But any claim that English has large amounts of basic vocabulary descended from Sanskrit (rather than acknowledging that both inherited them from the same source) is just straight-up insane.
There’s a lot of people who like to come up with new “theories” about the development of languages, but it’s a sad, laughable attempt in comparison to the real labor done by historical linguists. Finding similarities in similar words can be due to chance, or due to similar origins, or because one was borrowed. But real, meaningful research uses more than a collection of similar words to draw its conclusions; an entire system to explain correspondences of sounds between languages must be developed to evaluate these claims. True historical linguistics work is immensely complicated, very difficult, and takes a hell of a lot of time.
It also can stand for Pickup, as in a pickup truck.
Or Purdue University. My family has always called the Indianapolis branch of Indiana University-Purdue University (IUPUI) “Ew-Pooey.”