Pissing contest

A pissing contest, or pissing match, is a game in which participants compete to see who can urinate the highest, the farthest, or the most accurately. Although the practice is often associated with adolescent boys, women have been known to play the game, and there are literary depictions of adults competing in it. Since the 1940s the term has been used as a slang idiomatic phrase describing contests that are "futile or purposeless", especially if waged in a "conspicuously aggressive manner". As a metaphor it is used figuratively to characterise ego-driven battling in a pejorative or facetious manner that is often considered vulgar. The image of two people urinating on each other has also been offered as a source of the phrase.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines a pissing contest as "a competition to see who can urinate the farthest or highest" and (in extended use) as "any contest which is futile or purposeless especially ones pursued in a conspicuously aggressive manner." The first cited use of the phrase comes from a 1943 Study and Investigation of Federal Communications Committee hearing before the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate F.C.C. where a politician was quoted as saying: "You boys have to understand .. that I have to deal with a combination like that of Hartley-David; it is like having a pissing contest with a skunk." The OED's first citation of pissing match is from a December 1971 Washington Post story that says "One Western diplomat ... discounting the significance of the Sino-Soviet arguments ... described it as 'a pissing match, and I'm glad not to be caught in the crossfire'".

Urban Dictionary's crowdsourced definition describes the term as being used figuratively "to refer to a meaningless though nonetheless entertaining act in which people try to outdo one another in any way." Comments found there also describe pissing contests as literal competition "in which two or more people, usually (but not exclusively) male, urinate with the intention of producing the stream with the greatest distance."The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English separates its definition of "pissing match" (a conflict involving "unpleasantries") from "pissing contest" (a conflict with negative attacks made by both sides). For "pissing contest" it offers a different image from other reference works: "From the graphic if vulgar image of two men urinating on each other". Both phrases are said to originate in the United States.

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