I heard these tales, but this morning I met one of the culprits....
One of my workers needed a bit of cash, as he had been given a $1500 fine for pissing on the fence up on the dirt road next to the hockey field.....
Seem's like NAMPOL ain't foolin' around, you break the law, they gonna nail you.....
yellocard
Don't even think of driving after a dop... there's cops around every corner, heard they nailed lots over the weekend.
Think Namibia has a over supply of cops at the moment... they don't know where to place them all... sorriso2
I cannot complain..... I would rather have too many cops enforcing the law than no cops...
A source just informed me that there are 17 more recruits coming to Oranjemund... their total numbers will then number 76 policeman/woman.......
The local business community will be petitioned to help sponsor bikes for the cops as the Station Commander once high visibility and wants the uniforms on the beat......
I also believe over the weekend, the force was out in full down at the SANDS SHEBEEN, dishing out fines left right and centre for urinating in the street and not in the allocated toilets....
I also heard that the Mine sponsored a Combi bus to Nampol, just awaiting it's GRN number plate....
Cool, the local taxi industry is gonna thrive on paydays now (assuming they don't all get pulled off the road!!!)
Wish they would clamp down on all the littering in town.
Are there any laws against it... ? image14
76? Think that's overdoing it a bit, but I agree. Rather too many than none at all...
How many cops did we have in the 70s? 2 or 3?
Jnr, yep a lot less cops in the 70's but bearing in mind that the security dept had their informers everywhere and the town was a priority for them in those days...
$1500? For many people thats the better part of a months salary and many of them have families to provide for. Not saying that there should be no punishment but the punishment seems a bit disproportionate to the crime if you ask me.
Lucky the poor guy hadn't had a bad curry earlier in the evening, he could have ended up with 3 to 5 with hard labour!!
@ Sean, about a year back the fines were about $200- $300..... the minister got pissed because the nation were still killing everyone on the roads..... taxi's killing about 20 at a time, every weekend there were traffic deaths, the Road fund has been depleted due to all the payouts.... nobody seemed to be listening..... so he whacked the fines up by a chunk to drive and drive the point home....
Another piece of useless information
Q From Bob Fleck: An item circulating online under the title Interesting History claims, "They used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot and then once a day it was sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were 'piss poor'." This screams of folk etymology. Can you offer real clarity?
A It certainly might be a folk etymology, except that the piece is in its intention merely a mischievous attempt to deceive its readers.
Tanners at work, from 'Microcosm' by W H Pyne, 1808
Tanners at work
However, as with other tongue-in-cheek suggestions about origins, a grain of truth exists in it. Urine has been widely used in many parts of the world in the preparatory stages of tanning, in particular to help remove the hair from hides before applying tanning agents.
The Romans, for example, collected urine for this purpose systematically and even put a tax on it. The most famous taxer was the emperor Vespasian in the first century AD. The long-gone French public pissoirs were given the name vespasiennes as a direct link to him. Vespasian's son is said to have objected to the disgusting origin of the tax revenues, to which in legend his father replied pecunia non olet, money doesn't smell, a tag that from time to time is still employed to argue that money isn't tainted by its origins.
However, the expression piss-poor is recent and has nothing to do with tanning. The current state of research suggests that it may have been invented during the Second World War, because the first examples in print date from 1946. Though it is still classed as low slang by dictionaries, its mildly unpleasant associations have become blunted by time and familiarity.
The origin is straightforward. Piss began to be attached to other words during the twentieth century to intensify their meaning. Ezra Pound invented piss-rotten in 1940 (distasteful or unpleasant, the first example on record) and we've since had piss-easy (very easy), piss-weak (cowardly or pathetic), piss-elegant (affectedly refined, pretentious), piss-awful (very unpleasant) and other forms.
Piss-poor began life in a similar figurative sense for something that's third-rate, incompetent or useless, as it does in this recent example:
Larkin's letters, wrote Philippe Auclair, writer and broadcaster, were "very funny, very beautiful, and very sad; the grace of an angel, the precision of a geometer, and the short-sighted, intolerant piss-poor idées fixes of a provincial buffoon".
The Spectator, 27 Nov. 2010.
Americans who know the idiom so poor he didn't have a pot to piss in, sometimes in the fuller form ... or a window to throw it out of, might wonder if this is the origin. The idiom appears in Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, published in 1936, so it does predate piss-poor. However, it's a graphic literal reference to poverty; as piss-poor was first used in a figurative sense, it's unlikely to have been influenced by the older idiom. In fact, the literal sense of extreme poverty for piss-poor didn't come along until a couple of decades later, which also provides another reason, if one were needed, that the story you quote is nonsense.
Michael! there was a saying in my younger days that a person or a family were piss poor meaning they sold their urine to a place that tanned hides. If you look this up they say there is a grain of truth in there,and again when I was younger I remember Dad and his brothers (the ones that were not killed in the wars) would go rabbit hunting they would skin them and of course cook the said rabbits wrap up the skins and give them to us kids to take around to the tanners. The other part of the story was my fathers Mum my grandmother kept a pot under the bed (grandmother was old then in her fifties born 1880) and every so often we were given a pot to take around to the tanners, I will let you guess what was in there and that's what we got as a payment a tanner...............in old money six pence 240 pence made up a pound. The people I'm talking about were not poor in fact quite recently I found out my grandmother had a passport and had visited France and Belgium to the graves of her sons killed in the first world war........................................ image04