"In an angry hearing peppered with shouts and potty talk, Goldman Sachs brass doggedly insisted Tuesday they have no regrets about dubious mortgage deals that soaked investors."

Pepper... potty... brass... dogs... soaking.... The Daily News madly mixes the metaphors as it challenges us to understand who, if anybody, are the good guys in the big showdown.

The potty talk was the repeated use of the word "shitty," which began in some Goldman Sachs email, and then got flung back at them by Carl Levin, who somehow thought it was a good idea to try to intimidate the Wall Greed Guys with lines like "Your own employees believed they are crap, a piece of junk, or a shitty deal."

NSFW video:



If your scatalogical stream of consciousness flows like mine, you may be thinking about the "soaked investors" being soaked in shit — something like that scene in "Slumdog Millionaire."

But the old expression "soak the rich" was not originally based on an image of dunking the rich in a vat of water or other liquid or somehow hosing them down or otherwise wetting them. The original etymology of "soak" is "suck." So "soak the rich" is more like suck the rich dry. I haven't been able to Google that answer successfully (suck-sessfully, as Bob Dylan would say).  But I wondered about this expression back in 1990, when we had to look things up in real books. Take my book-learned word for it and don't picture those "soaked investors" drenched in shit (or anything else). Picture them dessicated. Not wet.