Masticating on Micturate

Sometimes I come across words that I am surprised to find have not had airing in this blog. In my reading this week I encountered the word micturate and (in my mind) paired it with masticate. When I checked to see, neither had been covered in a post. So let's correct that oversight.

Micturate was used in an article (by Matt Labash in The Weekly Standard magazine) about simplicity, then explained by saying "I would rather say 'squirt' than 'micturate.'" But dictionary.com defines it as "to pass urine, urinate." More commonly the word would be "piss," a good word though in polite conversation one would use some euphemism like "go to the restroom." In fact, there are a number of euphemisms for urinate: "answer the call of nature," "see a man about a horse," or as the character Sheldon on the television comedy "Big Bang Theory" says: "void my bladder."

Micturate has an interesting etymology, according to etymonline.com. It came to English in 1842, a malformation of the correct English word (that had been used since 1725) micturition that has the same definition. But etymonline.com says about micturate something I had never read: "malformed, and with an erroneous sense; condemned from its birth." Yet it is the more commonly used - I have not seen the word micturition before this research. Micturition comes from the Latin word micturitum, which is the past participle of micturire, that means "a desire to urinate." It is a desiderative (look it up yourself - it's a grammar term to describe a verb formation in Latin and other inflected languages) of mingere, that means to urinate.

Prior to 1725 the word that was commonly used was piss. Piss can be properly used as a verb for urinate or as a noun for urine. It was first used in the verb sense (for the act of urination) in the 1200s and came to English from the Old French word pissier, which the Old French got from the Vulgar Latin word pissiare. The noun sense (for urine itself) arrived in English a century later.

My grandfather, a very religious and completely proper individual, surprised me one day by describing someone as "so stupid they could not pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the sole." I was a bit taken aback by his use of the word piss in the humorous expression. In the 20th century many idiomatic slang expressions using the word piss were formed, such as piss away (1948, waste time), or less politely "piss off" (1958, primarily British for go away), or "pissed off" (1946, primarily American for angry).

The other word in today's title is masticate. It simply means to chew, and comes from the Late Latin masticatus, which is the past participle of masticare. It has been used in English since the 1640s. It is not uncommon for it to be used humorously in an expression where the word masturbate would also make sense.

And that should be enough for you to "chew on" today.