Silly question here:
Why, when we have to use the bathroom, do we say we have to “Pee”? Isn’t that a short form of saying “piss”? When did it become proper to use a shorter form of the word piss? Why didn’t people say they had to “U” or “Urn” or something short for urine?
A why is/was the word piss ever considered a nasty word in the first place? Isn’t it used in the Bible?
A guess.
Maybe the same reason we say, “I have to eat.” instead of
“I have to food.”
Piss is probably considered a nasty word for the same reason that shit is. It’s not considered polite to talk about bodily functions.
I know the King James Version uses “piss”. It’s possible it wasn’t considered a bad word at the time the KJV was written.
Piss is the word we inherited from the speakers of Germanic prot-English.* Urinate is the “polite” word we borrowed from Latin (by way of Norman French). Any number of concepts take their “polite” forms from either French or Latin while their “vulgar” (literally, “of the common people”) forms are from the earlier Old or Middle English.
If people are going to speak euphemistically, it makes sense that they would apply the euphemism to the less savory word.
*The famous/notorious fountain in Brussels that is in the form of a small boy, urinating is called, in Dutch, mannekin pis–pissing boy.
From the American Heritage Dictionary:
That “of imitative origin” suggest that the word is an example of onomatopoeia. Onomatopoetic words tend to be quite similar across all languages (for obvious reasons), and they’re not cognates (since the languages aren’t genetically related). It looks like it could quite easily have come from either – but my money is on Tom~ in this instance.
Actually, I had forgotten that Old French had pissier. On inspection, I find that the OED says that, in this instance, the Germans, Dutch, and English borrowed the word from French.
The use of piss as the vulgar=common word with the Latin-derived word replacing it for “polite” use stands.
piss is undoubtedly onomatopeic. It’s in Shakespeare, too. Quite a bit. I’m sure “pee” is abbreviation for “piss”. One might as well ask why we don’t “M” – “micturition” means the same as “urination”.
You know, only a scientist would ask this. 