We received a very strange question from a reader about whether or not there is “such a thing as a piss worm.” Her mother’s neighbor in Southern Illinois reported that she saw a “piss worm,” which we suppose you could just as easily write as “pissworm,” and said that it was very poisonous. The reader was also wondering about this second point, so the question we are confronted with is this: are there such things as piss worms (pissworms), and if so, are they poisonous?

As far as we can tell, and as we would have guessed, there are no such thing as a “piss worm.” We suppose it is possible that “piss worm” is used to describe some sort of creature in some regional dialect – names of worms and larvae are linguistically unregulated in the extreme – but we have never heard of any creature that goes by the name “piss worm.” Rather, in the very rare instances in which we have heard the term, it is used as an insult, as a way to dismiss a person as annoying and beneath your station. The etymology of this colorful expression is unknown to us, but its current usage (generally as one word) is documented in sources like Urban Dictionary, which offers some additional definitions of “piss worm” that are better left off the stately pages of All About Worms.

By all indications, our reader appeared to ask her question in earnest – if not, wherefore the highly specific mention of her mother’s neighbor, and why the concern about the piss worms’ alleged poison? – but it did occur to us that the reader wrote to us as a joke, perhaps prodding us to apply our identification methods to a certain type of person instead of a type of worm. If this is what the reader was after, we suppose we can say, yes, there are such things as pissworms, and in a loose sense they are poisonous because they spoil whatever social situations they manage to wriggle themselves into. However, we know of no actual worms or similar creatures that are called “piss worms,” and so we are fairly certain there is no poisonous piss worm lurking somewhere in Southern Illinois, one that would no doubt be plotting revenge, if it existed, for the unfortunate name it was given.

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