Expressions with piss

Piss, slang for urine, or to urinate, is also used figuratively in many common slang expressions. It is widely considered to be offensive and insulting,primarily due to its association with excrement, but also due to the associations gathered through its use in literature.
History
Onomatopoetic in origins, “piss” began as a common and innocuous reference, used in observation to describe urination(“Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology “piss”). In speech, it was the only word for the concept, first used in the middle of the 13th century while “urine” was not used until nearly a century later, and the verb “to urinate” was not used until 1600, and even then primarily in the context of medicine(OED “Urine”).
However, later, as "piss" was used in literature, it began to acquire a negative connotation and signify vulgarity. In Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" only lower class characters use the word, the reeve, for example, but not the Knight. Chaucer attempted to present “The Knight’s Tale” in the traditional, romantic style of his times, and focused his story around the prim and comfortable life of nobles at court (“Geoffrey Chaucer”). His other stories paint a picture of the squalor most common people faced. Not only is the Knight too refined to use the word “piss”, he simply does not have as much contact with excrement as his lower born counterparts. For them, “piss” is a part of their daily struggles: Chaucer lets the use of piss differentiate between the ideal and romanticized life of the nobility, of which most only dreamed, and the unpleasant reality of the lives of the vast majority of people during the medieval era.
Extending Chaucer’s use of “piss” to invoke the coarseness of everyday life, later writers used the word to indicate a return from irrationality to the real world. In James Joyce’s novel, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus is overcome with out of control emotions, so intense that “he hardly where he walking” until he smells “horse piss and rotted straw”(Joyce 95) . Just as Chaucer’s use of “piss’ coincides with cognizance of the harsh reality of medieval life, Joyce employs the word “piss” to shift Dedalus’ focus outward so that he realizes how irrelevant his anguish is in a larger context: the culture, represented by the use of “piss” is stable, the smell is beyond his control, and thus his own inner world is pale and trifling compared to the gritty and vibrant reality(Klein 953). Though this realization “calm his heart”, for many, the acknowledgement of their irrelevance is belittling and disturbing: they find the acknowledgement of their ultimate futility obscene.
Expressions using piss tend to focus on the shades of figurative meaning the word has gained through its use in literature, and are offensive, to a degree, because they remind their subjects of realities better left undisturbed, just as Joyce used the word to bring Dedalus back to the streets of Dublin form his personal crisis.
List of Expressions
*to piss off
** Meaning “to annoy or disappoint,” it can refer to situations when reality does not live up to expectations: a person may “piss” someone off by failing them in some way. The Oxford English Dictionary cites “What really pissed me off was Jon talking about my sex life” as a 2003 example of the phrase’s use, in which the speaker is upset that Jon betrayed her by disseminating her private information . The speaker had hoped he would have respected her privacy more; the use of “piss” to describe her feelings when he did not is consistent with the word’s association with the revelation of harsh realities. Recently, “to piss off” has become more and more prevalent in spoken American English.
**to piss off can also mean to go away, or to scram.
*piss-poor
**In the modern lexicon, piss poor is a word to describe something that's inadequate and can often be used as an insult . Like other uses of "piss" it implies the illumination of an unpleasant truth: that an endeavor was not completed as well as hoped or expected.
*to take the piss out of
**To take the piss out of means to mock or to make fun of . Teasing is hurtful because it touches upon an area its subject is sensitive about, often unearthing a truth they would rather ignore; associating this concept with "piss" is consistent with the word's evincive power.
*piss away
*piss into the wind
*piss and vinegar
*pissy

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