Is “p*ss” proper language?

A reader writes:

You needn’t have apologized for the “offensive word” in the English translation from Jyllands-Posten. The word is found, without asterisks, in the King James Version, at 2 Kings 18:27 and Isaiah 36:12. Alan Watts, the philosopher, told of his religiously confused uncle who eventually rejected Christianity altogether after coming across those verses.

LA reply:

It’s true the word “piss” appears twice in the King James, and also “pisseth” appears six times, in passages in Samuel and Kings where David tells his men to kill “any that pisseth against a wall,” i.e., all males. I love those passages, what a colorful way to describe males as distinct from females, as those that pisseth against a wall. The Revised Standard Version, which systematically removes the concrete Hebrew expressions from the Old Testament, changes those passages to simply “male” or “males,” removing the color of the original. The Committee that wrote the RSV stripped the Bible’s language not just of its vividness and life, but of its actual meaning. My favorite (or rather least favorite) example of this sterilization process is the RSV’s treatment of Psalm 17, verse 10. In the King James Version, it reads, “They are inclosed in their own fat,” a literal translation from the Hebrew. The RSV changes this to, “Their hearts are closed to pity,” which is merely one possible (and not at all primary) meaning of the phrase and a rather flaccid and sentimental one at that, and completely loses the rich psychological truth of the original.

In any case, the use of “pisseth” in the KJV is not dispositive of this issue. Let’s say you were giving a political speech or writing an article for an opinion magazine. Would you say, “The Democrats are really pissing me off,” or “The left is pissing on us”? And if you did, and someone said that was not language to use in that setting, would you say, “Well it’s ok, because ‘piss’ is in the King James Bible”?

David is a warrior speaking to his men and telling them to kill their enemies. The language used by soldiers, including lots of things besides “piss,” is not the language used in a newspaper or an opinion magazine or a tv show or a website devoted to cultural and political issues.

My position stands. I do not generally use at VFR language that is not considered proper language. But when I do, I explain why, or I use asterisks, in deference to the normal standards that in this instance I am violating.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 16, 2006 10:30 PM | Send