This
database is a comprehensive collection of all the American idioms and slang available.
American Idioms are many and varied. We hope you enjoy our collection. We are adding more all the time.
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You want to have children! We can't afford them, we don't have a pot to piss in. In medieval London, people did not have indoor plumbing. It was common to use a chamber pot as an indoor toilet. The chamber pot could then be dumped out a window into the street gutter below. A person who did not have a "pot to piss in" was poor indeed. In medieval times the word "piss" was not considered at all vulgar. It was not until Victorian England that words such as piss were deemed vulgar. Even today phrases like "pot to piss in" and "Full of Piss and Vinegar" are somehow considered to be generally acceptable and only moderately crude.
If what someone says should be taken with a pinch of salt, then they exaggerate and distort things, so what they say shouldn't be believed unquestioningly.
('with a grain of salt' is an alternative.)
If someone is trying to convince people to do or feel something without any hope of succeeding, they're beating a dead horse.
This is used when someone is trying to raise interest in an issue that no-one supports anymore; beating a dead horse will not make it do any more work.