'A Yellow Flower Growing in the Grass'

Dr. Johnson’s definition for pissabed is genteel and a little vague, though nicely trochaic: “a yellow flower growing in the grass.” At first I thought Johnson was making a politely metaphorical reference to urine, which turns out to be true but only indirectly. The OED gets medicinally specific: “The dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, formerly well known for its diuretic properties.” Dictionaries contain words, of course, but words sometimes contain dictionaries.

Among the citations in the OED is one from Samuel Beckett’s Watt: “Of flowers there was no trace, save of the flowers that plant themselves, or never die, or die only after many seasons, strangled by the rank grass. The chief of these was the pissabed.” Read on for another definition: “a bed-wetter.” That’s how Beckett’s friend James Joyce uses it in the “Oxen of the Sun” chapter in Ulysses: “Pope Peter’s but a pissabed.” It gets even nastier. Lord Byron uses the word as an adjective in an 1820 letter to his publisher, John Murray, referring to “Johnny Keats’s p-ss a bed poetry.”

 

Thanks to the reader so delighted to have discovered pissabed that she had to tell me about it.