Eggcorn Forum

For many English speakers pour and poor (and paw) are homophones and piss-poor, meaning shoddy and inferior, could be misread as a metaphoric drenching in urine.

— sure it’s a sentence but it’s a piss pour example of proper english usage, all the same it still gets its message across. but to my ears …

At best the guy is a piss pour paranormal investigator, but I think he is just a charlatan, that gives real paranormal investigators a bad name.

... you should be pissed at pissing away a great an upcoming career you could have had at United. You had a piss pour attitude all around.

It is a piss pour hat dater that would only look at one thing and try to tell you how old your hat is. Like.

A hat dater! Why did no-one tell me about this job when I was a youth? I’m always looking at more than one thing even when I’m not supposed to. Like.

I imagine many us will assume that the origin of piss-poor lies in the collection by the poor of urine for the leather making industry providing, of course, they were lucky enough to possess a micturition vessel of some sort, but the invaluable Michael Quinion at World Wide Words says:

”... 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.”