Pizey is an old dialectal term from the United Kingdom that means “peevish” or “irritable.” Pizey and pize, as in A pize upon you! may be related to the word poison. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Pizey”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Mary.
Hi, Mary, where are you calling from?
I’m calling from central New York near Cooperstown.
Oh, nice. Welcome to the show.
Well, the word that I am so curious about is paisy. Unfortunately, when I was little, it was used to describe my behavior.
Oh, no.
By my mother, or if another little person in our neighborhood was acting up or acting whiny or whatever, she’d say, don’t be Pizy. So I was just curious.
Well, Pizy is not that common a word, P-I-Z-Y, but you do see it in the old dialect dictionaries of England.
No kidding.
Yeah, particularly the northern and western parts of England, and it’s a term that means peevish or irritable.
No kidding.
Mary, do you use the word now, Pizy, with other people?
I do not. Although I will say it gets used with my cats and kittens because I don’t have children. So it’s not just made up out of my mind.
If it’s the same word, it seems to be exactly the same. It is strange to hear it come out of an American’s mouth after all these years because it is not widespread, but here it is. And maybe we’ll get calls confirming that other people use it still.
Well, Mary, thank you for calling us. If anything else from your childhood pops up and you need an answer, give us another call, will you?
This is exciting.
Thank you guys so much. This has been great fun.
Take care.
All right.
Take care.
Bye-bye.
Okay.
Bye-bye now.
There’s no etymology given in the English dialect dictionary, but one thing that occurred to me is there is the pronunciation of poison as pison.
I was thinking about that. And I was just wondering if that was an even more abbreviated form of having to do it. Because did you see that entry about pies as kind of a swear almost?
Yeah.
Where it’s something like you might say, like, well, a pie is upon him.
Right.
Or pies upon him.
Right.
And I’m wondering if poison on him is what that means.
Yeah, poison or pox or pest. Something like that, yeah.
All of those have been proposed for that.
But, yeah.
My dad used to talk about pies and taking pies.
Yeah.
