Meaning:
`Praying at the porcelain altar' is a comic reference to kneeling and
vomiting down the toilet.
Background:
This is one of the colourful phrases coined by, or at least popularized by,
the Australian comedian Barry Humphries during the 1970s in his Barry
McKenzie column in Private Eye.
Humphries is a master at such earthy language and has a repertoire of phrase
for vomiting, coined or collected in his native Australia. He could hardly do
better than study the works of a previous master collector - Francis Grose.
In the 1785 version of his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, he
lists `Admiral of the Narrow Seas' as:
"One who drunkenly vomits into the lap of one who sits next to him."
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The first retching I remember was after a supper of dumplings with ground lamb
filling, a rare treat on a special occasion in the late 70s. There was no altar
to pray at, though, porcelain or otherwise. I puked over a storm drain on the
nearby street. Nothing to be proud of but, besides my own piggishness, it told
about an era of shortage.
