It was late one Saturday night. We had just returned to our red cabin deep in the woods of Ohio, in the countryside east of Cleveland, beyond Shaker Heights.
"God, I'm pissed!" I announced as I crawled into my bed.
Chris said nothing as he also hit the hay.
I had arrived at the summer camp just two days before. Somehow Chris and I had requisitioned a cabin all to ourselves, even though there would have been room for two other male counsellors.
We had been to "Skip & Ray's" bar by Route 87 - just a mile away and there we had consumed a couple of large glass pitchers of blonde American beer. That is why I was drunk or as English people will commonly say - "pissed". It doesn't mean that we are angry about anything. It just means we are inebriated.
If we are annoyed, irritated or angry about something we often describe that state as being "pissed off". Adding the "off" is key to the changed meaning.
In the early summer of 1976, I had no idea that our colonial cousins in the USA used the term "pissed" differently. At some point during the week that followed, Chris and I laughed when we realised our linguistic misunderstanding.
Previously, I alluded to this same tale when I wrote a bunch of memoir blogposts concerning the two summers I spent as a camp counsellor in Ohio. Go here. Many of you will have never read that sequence.
Let me move on to the business of being "pissed off". I am writing the day after Mad Trump announced that he would be reversing Obama-era scientific rulings that underpin all federal actions on curbing planet-warming gases.
This is utterly crazy and flies in the face of solid scientific findings. It gives other hesitant governments the green light to rip up climate change legislation and carry on as ignorantly as before we truly realised the damage that mankind had done to this beautiful planet by burning fossil fuels. Yes I am definitely pissed off about this latest move by Orange Ignoramus but I guess it may have been just another card played as a way of deflecting continuing interest in what we should start calling the Trump-Epstein Files. His farty name appears in those files over a million times.
As I am reflecting on the verb "to piss", I wish to report that it is still pissing it down here in South Yorkshire (i.e. it's raining) but tomorrow the weather people are predicting a day of blessed relief between meteorological systems. The sun will shine down upon St Valentine's Day and all will be well with the world as the intrepid Yorkshire Pudding walks out somewhere...anywhere to see Earth's colours revealed once more...
"Love comforteth like sunshine after rain" - William Shakespeare
"Venus and Adonis" (1593)
A Couple of Large Pitchers of Blonde American Beer ...
ReplyDeleteLionel Trilling divided novelists of his time into the Aesthetes and the
The Boys in the Back Room ordering jugs of beer.
Saroyan, Steinbeck, Dos Passos, James T Farrell, O'Hara, Robert Penn Warren,
Richard Wright, Upton Sinclair, James M Cain, and Dorothy Parker the only girl ...
Trilling's essay always makes me think of Marlene Dietrich :
The Boys in the Back Room. YouTube.
Marlene sang it in Der blaue Engel (1930) directed by Josef von Sternberg.
Hitler sent a telegram to Los Angeles begging her to return to Berlin.
"The Boys in the Back Room"... I wonder if that title inspired another drama title - "The Boys from The Black Stuff" by Alan Bleasdale (1982).
DeleteBleasdale's still alive. So are Willy Russell, Jimmy McGovern,
Deleteand Neville Smith the actor & screenwriter of Gumshoe (Albert Finney).
Roger McGough is still here and Hunter Davies. Last of the North.
Shelagh Delaney died 2011. Trevor Griffiths died 2024.
Andrea Dunbar (1961-1990) died tragically. I wish she was here, writing.
Remembering Andrea Dunbar. YouTube.
DeleteA second video : An admirer visits her grave in Bradford.
This post took me to a favourite subject. Good one! English is replete with so many such examples. Call and call off - meanings totally different. Pull out> without a hyphen is a verb, but a hyphen, it becomes a noun.
ReplyDeleteEnglish is a contrary, ever evolving language.
DeleteWe do have a number of words where we have different meanings and the we have different spellings. I use or or our endings whenever I feel like it.
ReplyDelete"whenever I feel like it"!!!! That's not the way to comply with rules surrounding grammar and spelling. Naughty Red!
DeleteActually, there is zero actual, real hard scientific evidence for the Obama-era EPA ruling that carbon dioxide is a dangerous gas, harmful to human life. In fact, the available evidence points to it being an essential plant food, with essentially zero potential to cause the dire outcomes arising from some very dubious computer toys (remember the old adage -garbage in, garbage out). And there is also some evidence that rising carbon dioxide levels are a trailing indicator of rising global temperatures, further undermining the shrieks of the AGW cultists.
ReplyDeleteScientific evidence overwhelmingly shows that human-induced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions—primarily CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide—are driving rapid climate change by trapping heat, leading to a 1.14°C increase in global temperatures since pre-industrial times. This warming has resulted in widespread environmental damage, including accelerated ice melt, significant sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and intensified extreme weather events, with emissions currently at an all-time high.
DeleteEven if that's true, Will -- and I don't believe it is -- wouldn't it be prudent to try to reduce the gases we pump into the atmosphere, given that there's a possibility they're harming the climate? I don't require certainty if there is any risk at all, and we have the ability to work toward changes that reduce that risk.
DeleteActually, even the IPCC have had to admit that there is no upward trend at all in extreme weather events despite rising carbon dioxide levels. Sea level increases have not changed in any meaningful way over the past century despite accelerated anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, the most obvious visible and documented effect of the higher carbon dioxide levels is a significant greening, with higher photosynthetic activity. The global temperature increase you refer to is entirely consistent with warming expected as the earth recovers from the Little Ice Age from around 1300-1800, and we still have not reached the temperatures seen during g the Mediaeval Warm Period around 1000, when significant levels of agricultural activity were happening on Greenland, only now being revealed as some of the ice retreats to expose the artifacts. And all of the modelled disaster scenarios continually fail to materialize - polar bears are thriving and expanding numbers, our children still get to regularly see snow,etc..
DeleteIn fact, the climate modellers have an abysmal track record of failed prophesies.
Steve -what the UK should have done was follow France and built sufficient nuclear capacity to supply electricity demand, and used gas and oil where most appropriate, including an expanded chemicals sector to take advantage of our own feedstocks from the Noth Sea. Now, we have the lunatic Miliband shutting down North Sea activity, forcing the UK into import substitution at a much greater overall carbon dioxide footprint, so idiotic on his own criteria of carbon dioxide reduction.
DeleteEven when the evidence was irrefutable, some intelligent people continued to insist that the Earth was flat.
DeleteI went back and read about the camp, sounds like fun except for the head injury. I don't recall many people saying "pissed" anymore when they are drunk, somehow it has become "wasted" unless that is also now obsolete. I vaguely remember a time when people said snookered or drunk-as-a-skunk. I also don't agree with everyone reciting the pledge of allegiance for every little thing, and the last bit "Liberty and Justice for all" is a joke for everyone not white and rich since Trump took over.
ReplyDeleteTrump has distorted the very notion of patriotism.
DeleteIn early days of the internet when I used to chat a lot online to strangers, I learnt about the different pissed meaning, and another that initially confused me was 'What's up', at times abbreviated to 'S'up'. I think it is like the way English folk say, 'Orright'. Neither require an answer.
ReplyDeleteDid Ray know you were chatting to these strangers?
DeleteMy American friends and I sometimes compare notes about expressions in British v. American English. Language never ceases to be fascinating.
ReplyDeleteNow I'm going to follow your "go here" link and check whether I read what you wrote back then.
You probably did as you have been a good blogging mate for a long time now. You are like the sister I never had.
DeleteI have never been "pissed", just occasionally quietly light-headed.
ReplyDeleteYou must have heard the expression "pissed as a Lord"? Lord Peregrine staggers to mind.
DeleteEnglish varies according to where it's spoken and by whom and doesn't take into account dialect and syntax, so it's little wonder we cannot always understand or make ourselves understood, even if we live in the same country.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what you just said Janice.
DeleteI've used pissed off quite a bit, but have never said, "I'm pissed," though I have been.
ReplyDeleteOh, it's all coming out now Bobby. Confession time!
DeleteThe English language is such a strange and entertaining language. I remember signing to a deaf caregiver once that the bus was pretty late. The look on her face.
ReplyDeletePissed off is also one of the few rude signs Katie knows:)
ReplyDeleteWhenever I say I'm pissed off about something, my spouse counters with "better to be pissed off than pissed on."
ReplyDeleteI’ve been pissed many times , namely in the sportsman pub walkey, the dog and partridge ( tripping lane ) and the ledmill
ReplyDeleteLast time I was pissed was during a lock in on one of my very many visits to Wales a couple of years ago.
ReplyDelete