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“That gives me the double-edged pip.”

 

Now there’s a Canadian saying that came here from the British Isles or Europe. It expresses annoyance or exasperation.

• Elizabeth Creath of Thessalon, Ontario writes me, “My dad came from Ireland and my mother was born in Manitoba to parents who had come from Germany in the late 1800s or early 1900s. These were sayings in our family. “That just gives me the pip” would be said of any annoying situation. My mother would embroider this as “the early morning pip,” “the double-edged pip,” or “the everlasting pip.” Once when mother was particularly put out, one of us kids said, “I guess this gave you the double-edged, starts-early-in-the-morning-and-lasts-forever pip, eh, Mom?”

Pip’s Odd Start. Just Say ‘Pfipfs’ Five Times.

The origin of this particular use of the word pip is startling. It refers to a disease of chickens which veterinarians call infectious coryza of poultry. It also affects members of the hawk family. Pip produces thick white mucus in a chicken’s throat and white scale on its tongue, so the bird eventually cannot ingest food properly and simply pines away.

A version of this word for this specific disease of chickens appears in almost every language of Europe. In Middle Dutch it was pippe, in Middle English and Middle Low German pip. To give a person the pip meaning to annoy that person has been an expression in English for at least 400 years. In Spanish, it’s pepita, in French pepie or pépie, in modern German Pips, in older German the delightfully plosive pfipfs. In Late and Popular Latin and early Italian it was pipita, derived from standard Latin pituita ‘slime.’ So pip has the same root as our modern anatomical term pituitary gland. That story belongs to the next paragraph.

Roman Snot? Oh My!

The Romans inherited from ancient Greek medical theory the belief that the brain produced snot (Latin, pituita) which was discharged from the nose when one sneezed. The Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle thought the brain produced this mucus to help cool the inside of the head. A sixteenth-century Belgian Andreas Vesalius, a great pioneer of anatomy, first named the organ the pituitary gland because he thought that’s where nasal mucus was made. Remember pituita means ‘snot’ in Latin.

Two other common English expressions feature the word. To get the pip is to contract any vague malaise or depressive illness. To have the pip is to be low in spirits, morose, or depressed.

Pip has a multitude of other meanings, but they must be kept for another column. I’ll end with one. Pip can be an affectionate nickname for a person named Phillip, as Charles Dickens teaches us on the first page of his novel Great Expectations:

“My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.”