最近在微信朋友圈贴过某英剧里出现的一句骂人话，不是“爆粗”，是羞辱人的话，出自一位毒舌女王大律师之口：
原话是 Find my bloody evidence, you monochrome moron，骂人话还押头韵，挺讲究，我称之为alliterative invective, 哪怕语义上有点无厘头，但说起来琅琅上口，解恨。骂人的话，解恨就行。
何况这个组合并非无厘头。
她骂的是尸位素餐、推诿塞责的办事员，她好言相求屁用没有，怒不可遏，于是吼了两句（这是第一句）。
于她而言，此人不光笨，还傻，像一张白纸上画了几个黑色的圈圈（还不太圆）。
翻成“白痴”，很贴切。
这句中文字幕的亮点，不仅限于此。看整句的语气，祈使句，没商量，翻得非常到位：
Find my bloody evidence, you monochrome moron!
给我把证据找来，你个白痴！
现在来看第二句，是紧接着上一句，从大律师嘴里蹦出来的：
Earn your piss-poor salary!
可见这位大律师的语言风格 is anything but monochrome...
这句也翻得可圈可点，从语义到语气，严丝合缝：
Earn your piss-poor salary!
好歹对得起那可怜的工资！
这种骂人的话，大律师张嘴就来，it just rolls off her tongue.
顺便提一下，你说某人撒谎成性，可以翻成 He is a compulsive liar. He is a pathological liar. He is mendacious by nature. 等等。
谎话连篇呢？What he said was a pack of lies.
睁着眼睛说瞎话呢？Telling blatant lies.
说谎不打草稿呢？Lies just roll off his tongue.
供参考。说不定有用。
言归正传。
Piss-poor, another specimen of alliterative invective!
少得可怜，好像跟尿没啥关系。难道仅仅为了凑头韵，把两个无关的词撮合在一起？
非也。我有个猜想，其“典故”来自这个说法：
这个说法跟家徒四壁、一贫如洗、室如悬磬相比，俗多了，但更具象。这个pot不是purpose-made chamber pot（图略）, 而是任何一种可以用来临时收纳废液的器皿，也就是瓶瓶罐罐之类，连这个都没有，真是穷得连“叮当响”都发不出来了。
大胆假设，上网求证......结果，我的猜想被证伪：
worldwidewords.org的博主Michael Quinion（剑桥学物理的，后来在BBC电台任职，喜欢研究英语词语演变，是《牛津新词词典》第二版的主编撰者之一）是这么说的：
Americans who know the idiom so poor he didn’t have a pot to piss in, sometimes in the fuller form... or a window to throw it out of, might wonder if this is the origin. The idiom appears in Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, published in 1936, so it does predate piss-poor. However, it’s a graphic literal reference to poverty; as piss-poor was first used in a figurative sense, it's unlikely to have been influenced by the older idiom.
换言之，piss-poor的本义，跟“穷”无关，是少得可怜的意思，也就是剧中大律师的意思：your piss-poor salary -- a meagre salary, a pittance.
在Quinion的网站上，名叫Bob Fleck的读者问:
An item circulating online under the title Interesting History claims, “They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot and then once a day it was sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were ‘piss poor’.” This screams of folk etymology. Can you offer real clarity?
博主作了详细解答，除了上面将季氏猜想证伪的那段外，主要内容如下：
However, the expression piss-poor is recent and has nothing to do with tanning. The current state of research suggests that it may have been invented during the Second World War, because the first examples in print date from 1946. Though it is still classed as low slang by dictionaries, its mildly unpleasant associations have become blunted by time and familiarity.
The origin is straightforward. Piss began to be attached to other words during the twentieth century to intensify their meaning. Ezra Pound invented piss-rotten in 1940 (distasteful or unpleasant, the first example on record) and we’ve since had piss-easy (very easy), piss-weak (cowardly or pathetic), piss-elegant (affectedly refined, pretentious), piss-awful (very unpleasant) and other forms.
Piss-poor began life in a similar figurative sense for something that's third-rate, incompetent or useless, as it does in this recent example:
Larkin’s letters, wrote Philippe Auclair, writer and broadcaster, were “very funny, very beautiful, and very sad; the grace of an angel, the precision of a geometer, and the short-sighted, intolerant piss-poor idées fixes of a provincial buffoon”. The Spectator, 27 Nov. 2010.
Quinion最后的结论是：
In fact, the literal sense of extreme poverty for piss-poor didn’t come along until a couple of decades later, which also provides another reason, if one were needed, that the story you quote is nonsense.
Okay, Your Honour and Mr Know-It-All, I rest my case.
But before I do, I'd like to remind my readers of the 'fuller form' that His Honour referred to: so poor he didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of...
and let them visualise that scenario at their leisure...
Now my case is firmly rested.
