would you approve it?

Is it a good old word or a bad one? Well it’s certainly an old word. The Online Etymology Dictionary says it goes back to around 1290:

piss (v.) … c.1290, from O.Fr. pissier “urinate” (12c.), from V.L. *pissiare, of imitative origin. As a pure intensifier (cf. piss-poor, piss-ugly, etc.) it dates from World War II. Pissed off “angry, fed up” is 1946, U.S. slang. To piss off “go away” is attested from 1958, chiefly British. Piss and vinegar first attested 1942. Piss-prophet “one who diagnosed diseases by inspection of urine” is attested from 1625. Piss proud “erect upon awakening” is attested from 1796.

It pops up fairly often on beer and wine labels. Above is Horse Piss Beer, made in Louisville, Kentucky. Another beer along these lines is Piss Brand Beer, made in Australia. And then there is Pisse Vieille wine, from Beaujolais. Wiki explains the name thusly:

The Brouilly cru also contains the famous Pisse Vieille vineyard (roughly translated as “piss old woman!”) which received it name from a local legend of a devout Catholic woman who misheard the local priest’s absolution to “Allez! Et ne péchez plus.” (Go! And sin no more.) as “Allez! Et ne pissez plus.” (Go! And piss no more). The vineyard name is...

Sparks is all but dead. Today 13 Attorneys General announced a settlement with MillerCoors. The settlement covers this well-known brand of malt beverage with caffeine, taurine, guarana, ginseng — and essentially removes it from the US market. The old label, in use from about 2001 until today, is on the left side above. The new label is on the right. The battery symbols, caffeine (and other ingredients) are banished. The settlement calls for MillerCoors to reformulate Sparks and change the labels within three weeks. It also requires MillerCoors to pay $550,000 in fees within five days. Upon announcing the settlement earlier today, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said:

“Sparks is an insidious and insane drink that deservedly now is down the drain — like all stimulant-spiked alcoholic drinks should be,” Blumenthal said. “Beverages like Sparks are a witch’s brew of alcohol and caffeine, energizing drunks and encouraging dangerous, even deadly behavior. Common sense says a drink impairing judgment while conferring excess energy is a very bad idea. Studies show that these drinks lead to binge drinking, car crashes, sexual assaults and other risky behavior. They impair reactions and reasoning, but instill the illusion of alertness and energy.”

The settlement is so far-reaching, it even includes newer MillerCoors products such as Rize.

Cary Wiggins alerted us to a recent, scholarly article about, of all things, the F-word. His blog, called Meeting the Sin Laws, covers the intersection of sin, vice, alcohol beverages, and the law.

Wiggins points to The Connotations of the F-Word. This is a post in The Language Log; it is a blog run out of the University of Pennsylvania since 2003. The post is by Chris Potts, a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He wants to get a better understanding of why people tend to remain so fascinated with this term (and other “taboo vocabulary”). He wants to know:

Does it in fact have sexual connotations even when used as an intensive, as in Bono’s “really, really f-ing brilliant”?

Ed. note: F-word modified. It’s not an idle topic; the FCC needs to grapple with this and so does TTB. Potts applies some fancy academics to this not so fancy topic, with cosine measures, cooccurrences, fleeting expletives, formal linguistic theories, latent semantic analysis, and even rubrics of framing. He does not necessarily conclude that the term has much to do with sex.

This topic has a fair amount of relevance here, because this terminology pops up on alcohol beverage labels more often than you...