In “Sexual lexical semantics”, I took up (among other things) similes like Maggie fucks like a mink, attributing enthusiasm in intercourse to Maggie. And now a comment from Robert G with a simile that was new to me:
“I have to piss like a mink”. One of the old-man’s odd turns of phrase. Surely he was an odd phrase-maker, but I cannot see as this fits into the general drift re: intransitives.
I don’t see intransitivity as the point of interest here (most uses of piss are intransitive). Instead, it’s the choice of comparison animal that intrigues me; where does the mink come from?
Piss like a mink was new to me, and I get no ghit for it and its variants. The standard comparison animal for pissing is the horse: piss like a horse, piss like a racehorse / race horse (elaborating on the simile a bit), piss like a Russian racehorse (introducing alliteration, for fun), piss like a Russian racehorse at the Kentucky Derby (spinning the thing out still more). (All of these have variants with the euphemistic verb pee.) I don’t think there’s any rational basis for any of the elaborations past the simple horse — though people are of course happy to concoct stories that would make sense of them.
But horse makes sense. Horses are large animals, so they piss quite substantial volumes, and the display is particularly impressive for male horses. (There are, of course, quite a few YouTube videos of male horses pissing.)
But then mink. One way minks could get into things would be, in fact, from the conventional simile fuck like a mink, using minks as a stereotypical symbol of excessiveness. And then the indirect allusion to fucking that comes along with mink makes piss like a mink just a bit dirtier than piss like a horse (and it’s assonant as well).
July 19, 2013 at 4:48 pm |
[…] looking at the simile piss like a horse (here), I came across references to the pizzles of male horses (from which copious piss streams, […]