full of piss

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM
Sun Sep 9 17:26:24 UTC 2012


Sean Wilentz  at
http://www.tnr.com/article/music/107007/blood-and-the-ballad-bob-dylans-macabre-new-album
:


"Pay in Blood” is the latest slashing Dylan revenge song, but more graphic
and grisly than ever, sung by a man who’s been through hell, warning a
bastard who demands respect in a land of ragged beggars and politicians
full of piss: “Sooner or later you’ll make a mistake/I’ll put you in a
chain that you never will break/Legs and arms and body and bone/I pay in
blood but not my own.”

Should mean "full of piss and vinegar," but seems to mean "full of shit."

Wilentz also writes, "Soon after I first listened to Bob Dylan’s intense
new album, *Tempest*, a friend who’d also heard it wanted to know what a
historian made of its line, early on, about the British burning down the
White House."

Well, it was a while back.

JL

-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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