Why does 'PU' refer to a bad smell?

It doesn't over here!

Really Richard? What if we spell it "poo" or "phew" and say it with a finger held under our nose and a wrinkled expression?

Yes. But this is PU - and I assume is pronounced as "pee-yew" - and we don't, in my part of the world at least, use that.

I always thought that PU == pyew, and is one of those strange, bad spellings which lead to a new pronunciation. For example, tsk, originally an dental click /|/, is now pronounced by some as /tIsk/. BTW, how does one spell the alveolar lateral click /‖/ that used to be used for getting ahorse to go, along with a gentle prod of one's spurs?

Ah, I see. Like those other abominations such as "PedXing" and "Nu"

I always assumed that "P-U", pronounced pee-you, stood for the first two letters of "putrid." But then...

BTW, how does one spell the alveolar lateral click /‖/ that used to be used for getting ahorse to go, along with a gentle prod of one's spurs?

I know exactly the sound you mean, jheem, and I am saying it as I write this, but I have no idea how to spell it. It is almost a "click" sound, with my tongue against my teeth on the side of my mouth.

BTW, I always thought "tsk" was a poor way to spell that noise. I surely don't say the letter "k;" for me, it it a sound of clicking my tongue at the front of my hard palate.

As for P.U., I found this on a Web site:

"There's a lot of arguing going on amongst linguistics experts about the origin of this word (if that's what you call it). The first thing to know is that nobody really knows how to spell it since P.U. isn't an abbreviation of anything. Here are the two explanations I heard the most (and believe me, asking a bunch of people what the origin of P.U. was a hell of a way to start off a conversation).
1) It's a shortened term for puteo, which is Latin for 'to stink, be redolent, or smell bad.' I actually called a professor of Latin at the University of Florida to verify this one.

2) It's actually spelled "piu," but is often pronounced as "pee-yew". It's root is the Indo-European word "pu," meaning to rot or decay. A lot of other languages use this root word and have the same general meaning."

It's a shortened term for puteo, which is Latin for 'to stink, be redolent, or smell bad.'

Well, isn't that whence came "putrid"? I rest my case.

I rest my case.

When I am right about something, I smugly say to my kids, "I rest my proverbial case!" No idea where it came from, but I love it!

Does "putrid" come from the Latin word and the Indo-European word? Or are those 2 words linked? It seems as though they could be.

Well, there's a reconstructed PIE root *pu- 'to rot, decay' from which came Latin putridus < putreo 'to be rotten' (cf. puteo 'to stink', putesco 'to rot, putrefy') < puter 'rotten'. (De)file, foul, and filth also come from this root; along with pus and fuzzy. I doubt that the interjection, pyew, came from this root, as the initial /p/ would have yielded an /f/ as in the foul et al. words. In fact, fooey, faugh, fie, and (Yiddish) feh might be related to *pu-. In German you say pfui! in some of the same situations as pyew. The P. U. from putrid seems like a folk etymology to me, but, hey, prove me wrong.

To digress a bit - let's talk about "pfui" for a moment. Nero Wolfe was fond of that particular utterance, and I always mentally rendered it as "PHOOey!", not "pfwEE."

Yes? No? A bit of a stretch?

It's NOT Purdue University?

In German, pfui is pronounced /pfui/.

jheem - could you please give me a link to describe the phonetic symbols you use?

thanks!

Sure, CW. I usually use SAMPA (and here), but occasionally I use IPA in Unicode (and here). Enjoy.