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What is the meaning of a sentence like "I pissed the wall"?
Is there any difference with "I pissed my pants"?

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Can you give any extra context? Out of context it sounds ungrammatical to me, and my best guess would be that it’s an error for a phrase like the one @D_Bye mentions, which would normally include some preposition(s). – PLL Mar 10 '11 at 14:41
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@PLL: Would "I heard somebody that was in the restrooms saying that" be enough as context? I am sure of what I have heard; I am not sure of how I should interpret the sentence. – kiamlaluno Mar 10 '11 at 14:49
youtube.com/watch?v=ZoP9AsrRF_Y – user5531 Mar 10 '11 at 16:07
How about "I pissed off the wall" – Thursagen May 31 '11 at 6:42

6 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

I can see four possibilities:

  • It’s an idiomatic figurative usage, analogous to something like I was shitting bricks. This seems very unlikely: none of us here seem to have heard any such usage, and Google doesn’t find anything.

  • It’s a literal usage, meaning “I pissed on the wall” (which is how most English-speakers would say it), but is correct in this speaker’s dialect/idiolect. This seems fairly unlikely, for the same reasons as before.

  • It’s not idiomatic, and is deliberate wordplay. There are a few idioms that this is analogous to, like “to piss the bed” or “to piss one’s pants”, and the speaker might have been jokingly adapting one of these.

  • It’s not idiomatic, and is a speech error, intended as “I pissed on the wall”, or similar. This seems the most likely to me — especially since if the speaker had actually just ?pissed the wall then he may well have been somewhat inebriated at the time…

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I think it is either 2 or 4. Hard to tell the difference for an outsider. – Cerberus Mar 10 '11 at 16:50
up vote 3 down vote

Do you mean "I pissed it up [against] the wall"? It's an idiom that roughly means to squander or waste, as in money, an opportunity, etc.

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I wrote the full sentence. – kiamlaluno Mar 10 '11 at 14:50
My apologies - it's not a usage I've ever encountered before. – D_Bye Mar 10 '11 at 15:21
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I think that it means you urinated on the wall.

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You cannot urinate a wall any more than you can defecate a house. – Ed Guiness Mar 10 '11 at 15:22
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@Ed: well, some things may be physically impossible but figuratively idiomatic. One can certainly shit bricks! But “pissing the wall” isn’t an idiom I’ve ever heard, nor anything similar with pissing… – PLL Mar 10 '11 at 16:12
I have updated my assertion. – Artic Mar 10 '11 at 16:20
up vote 2 down vote

In biblical usage, it means that you are male.

(See 1 Samuel 25:22, 34; 1 Kings 14:10, 16:11, 21:21; 2 Kings 9:8)

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Does the Bible use a phrase like "pissed the wall"? – kiamlaluno Mar 10 '11 at 15:06
I just gave you six references... – Peter Olson Mar 10 '11 at 15:07
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@PoC those references (at least the first one that I checked) use the phrase "pissed against the wall" not "pissed the wall". – Ed Guiness Mar 10 '11 at 15:24
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@PoC He's quoted it, and emphasised the exact quote, so it does seem to be an important distinction. It would be a trivial question otherwise. – Ed Guiness Mar 10 '11 at 15:28
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@Peter: I’d agree with Ed that I don’t think this answers the question at hand — but thanks for pointing out a lovely euphemism (or is it a dysphemism?) that I hadn’t come across before! – PLL Mar 10 '11 at 16:23
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up vote 1 down vote

It means to waste one's money. As in, "I wasted all my paycheque on beer and now I've got nothing. I pissed it up the wall!"

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up vote 0 down vote

As a foreign English speaker, I think the verb 'piss' can be used as a transitive verb (at least in my native language), it means piss and make something dirty.

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