A Phrase that Passeth Understanding – Frank McNally on a rude biblical euphemism

Irish Times

2 days ago

When asking readers for the name or other examples of the rhetorical device used in such phrases 'a bigger bollocks never put his arm through a coat' (Diary, yesterday), I thought Shakespeare might feature in responses.
I wasn't quite expecting the Bible. But there it is anyway, thanks to Charlie Goldsmith, who emails from Lusaka to draw my attention to the First Book of Samuel, verse 25:22.
In the King James version, at least, that has a similar case of what Charlie calls 'aggression through circumlocution'. The context is a future King David vowing to kill all his enemies and invoking divine vengeance against any who escape him.
Or as he puts it: 'So and more also do God unto the enemies of David, if I leave of all that pertain to him by the morning light any that pisseth against the wall'.
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I don't recall ever hearing the last verb there mentioned at Mass. But as I now know, the phrase '[any] that pisseth against the wall' occurs repeatedly in the King James Bible. And always, it just means 'men and boys'.
Walls are not the point, per se - it's more to do with the angle of urination practised by those being targeted: ie, they're not women.
Even so, it reminded me of the 2016 European Football Championships, when thousands of Irish football fans, mostly male, congregated for several nights outside several neighbouring bars in Paris, where nobody had thought of proving portaloos.
The walls of one local side street, Rue Pierre Haret, were turned into what the
mairie
called 'une pissotière géant'. Whether they knew it or not, some irritated residents were advocating vengeance along the lines of 1 Samuel 25:22, and not just as a figure of speech.
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It was less of a surprise that the late Hugh Leonard should feature in responses to my question, as he did in an email from Don Kavanagh. But by coincidence, his example covers similar ground to the Bible.
It's from the memoir Home Before Night, where Leonard is returning to visit his elderly father in Dalkey (then as now, clearly, a place apart from the city that surrounds it). Despite increasing frailty, he finds the old man still fiercely proud of his independence:
''I blacked the range yesterday,' he would boast when I came to see him. 'And go out and look at the garden. Fine heads of cabbage that a dog from Dublin never pissed on'.'
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Getting back to James 'Skin-the-Goat' Fitzharris, whose 'I came from Sliabh Buidhe, where a crow never flew over the head of an informer' was the primary cause of my speculations on rhetoric, another reader suggests a sobering explanation.
Gerry Gallagher doesn't put a name on the use of an apparently unconnected detail to emphasise a main point. But he suggests the avian image was not completely extraneous, having a grim origin in 'the association between crows and the gallows'.
His email adds: 'The cabbie was born well within human memory of the 1798 rising and must have heard stories of the public hangings and evisceration of many of those judged complicit with the rebels.'
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It's not like James Joyce to raise the tone of a column that has been dominated by the theme of urination. But to the continuing mystery of the anonymous postcard in Ulysses, and the many possible meanings of 'U.P.: up' (also in yesterday's Diary), long-time correspondent Terry Moylan adds another layer of complexity.
That too dates from the 1798 Rising, when the word 'up', as in 'risen', took on a political significance. Hence, for example, a ballad of the period, entitled 'A Vernal Ode', which might have passed for a reflection on Spring, unless you were in the know.
An early verse goes like this: 'Each plant erects its pendant head/Each flower expands its cup/The very weeds in every bed/Set impudently - Up.' But later, the politics become clear: 'The progress of this rising rage/No human power can stop/Then, Tyrants, cease your war to wage/For Nature will be – Up.'
That first appeared in the Northern Star newspaper in 1797 and was included in Terry's book The Age of Revolution in the Irish Song Tradition (2000). 'Up', he adds, was a password used by the United Irishmen and perhaps also by the [Catholic] Defenders. A member of both organisations was said to be 'up and up'.
Among the contributors to the Northern Star in those years was the Rev. James Porter (1752/3 – 1798), a Presbyterian minister and satirist whose characters including 'Squire Firebrand', a landlord's agent, and 'Billy Bluff', a farmer who spies on his neighbours.
In one sketch, the squire teaches Billy the revolutionaries password, but they both struggle to understand what the letters mean. Agreeing that 'U' must stand for 'union', they guess that 'P' might he 'power,' or 'Protestant', or 'Presbyterian'. Then the squire has a brainwave: 'Union with the Papists, now I have it.'
Although of radical politics, Porter was never proven to have been a member of the United Irishmen, or to have taken up arms in the rebellion. Even so, he was 'up' before the judge, in every sense, and hanged in July 1798.