Piste

Piste (pronounced peest)

(1) In skiing, a downhill trail or run.

(2) In competitive fencing, the internationally recognized regulation-size strip, 2 m (6’ 6”) in width and 14 m (46’) long.

(3) A track left by somebody riding a horse (archaic).

(4) A spoor made by a wild animal.

1727: From the Old French piste (beaten track of a horse or other animal) from the Italian pista (via (a beaten track)) a variant of pesta (footprint).  Pesta was a deverbal of pistare & pestare (to pound, crush) a Vulgar Latin frequentative of the Latin pīnsere, pistus the past participle.  Other languages picked up piste from the French.  Like English, Lithuanian, Dutch and German used the same spelling (the Germans capitalizing the noun) while there’s also the Catalan pista, the Greek πίστα (písta), the Persian: پیست‎ (pist) and the Turkish pist.  The alternative spelling pist is now rare.  Piste is a noun; the noun plural is pistes.

In Dutch, a piste (diminutive pistetje) is (1) a downhill ski run, (2) a track used in competitive athletics, or (3) a ring in a circus.  In Finnish, piste was originally a synonym of pisto (sting; prick, puncture).  In examples of linguistic innovation it was used in typography to mean "period, full stop, dot", use later extending to the sense of “mark or stroke above a letter” and a “unit of font size or spacing”.  In geometry it meant "point", thus the general sense in mathematics of it being the representation of a dimensionless object in space and thus a specific location and in figurative (though obviously inaccurate) use, piste came mean “tiny; something infinitesimally small”.  The idea of small was picked up in the scoring systems of various sports, a piste being (in the familiar sense of “a point”) the smallest unit a team or player could be awarded.

In French, the phraseology provides the descriptive nuances which indicate whether piste is being used in the literal sense of physical geography or figuratively thus: Une piste automobile dans le desert (track left in the desert sand by a car); piste cyclable (a bicycle path); La police est sur la piste d’un complot (the police are following a lead in their investigation of a conspiracy); piste d’atterrissage (an airport runway); piste de danse (a dance floor).  English adds modifiers to trail, track etc in the same manner.  In the sense in which piste is used in English, the French also use it to refer to ski slopes in general but also in more elaborated forms to differentiate where necessary: piste de ski (ski slope, ski trail); piste de luge (sled or sledge track).  Use in Italian follows the French but, noting the quality of snow as a white powder, imaginatively adds piste as the street slang for a line of cocaine and it’s a word which in this sense might see a goodly amount of use because the 2019 Global Drug Survey identified Italy as the world’s second largest consumer of the narcotic.

On the Piss

Piste is pronounced peest and the usual phrase when speaking of skiing is “on the piste” so care must be taken it’s not confused with another phrase, often used in parts of the English-speaking world, the operative word there pronounced pis.

On the piss: Crooked Hillary Clinton enjoys a quick belt of Crown Royal Bourbon Whiskey, Bronko's restaurant, Crown Point, Indiana, Saturday 12 April, 2008.

On the piss: Boris Johnson enjoying champagne, port and a pint.  It's not known if these photographs were all taken the same day.

On the piste

On the piste: An assured Lindsey Vonn (b 1984), four-time World Cup alpine ski champion and Olympic gold medallist.

In pink, on the piste: A less assured Lindsay Lohan, on skis during filming of Netflix’s Falling for Christmas.  The pink jumpsuit and pink fluffy vest are available on-line.