When you think about it, what in the world does that mean, piss poor? It doesn’t make sense. Well, I’m here to give you the skinny on that. Back in the good old days of Merrie Olde England a few hundred years ago, the well-off townsfolk lived in hovels and ate mud. The poor folk were even worse off. With no jobs in tech support or customer service to be had, lowly families all peed into a big jug so that they could sell their pee to the tanneries. That’s about as low as you can go, and that’s why we call it being piss poor.

But wait! There’s more! Some families didn’t even have enough money to buy a pail for everyone to pee in. Those really, really poor people literally didn’t have a pot to piss in. And the moral of the story is, it’s great not to be living in the Middle Ages!