PU, OK?

Photo by Dru Kelly, via Flickr

A spirited conversation occurred a few years ago between me, my daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter, when my grandson, age 2½, came running into the room, sporting a diaper full of poop. “PU!” exclaimed everyone. (Except my grandson, who was too young to care.)

And that started us off on the question of where did the exclamation PU come from? It’s an interesting question, but it turns out that no one really knows. (Linguists actually spend their professional time arguing about this question.)

First off, no one knows how it’s even spelled. Is it pew? or P.U.? And if it’s P.U., what do the P and U stand for? Or is it an abbreviation of a longer word?

Oh, how useful is the magic Google! What did we do before the Internet and we had to simply wonder about these fascinating questions?

Unfortunately the internet wasn’t that helpful on this one. We found out that some linguists think PU is a shortened term for puteo, Latin for “to stink or smell bad.” Other linguists think its root is the Indo-European word “pu” meaning to rot or decay.

And that’s as much as we could find out. So far. Perhaps someday I will discover the definitive answer to this earth-shaking question. Writers actually spend valuable time thinking about these things. Usually when they’re experiencing a case of Writer’s Block.

Kim Pearson is an author, ghostwriter, and owner of Primary Sources, a writing service that helps others become authors of professional and compelling books and articles. She has authored 12 books of her own, and ghostwritten more than 45 non-fiction books and memoirs. To learn more about her books or services, visit kimpearson.me.