Dad's Dictionary...

PHIZZOG

Honestly, I really don't know where my dear father got these words from. "Go wash yer phizzog, you got chocolate from ear to ear" (and I can't for the life of me figure out who he would've said this to...)

Your phizzog, or fizzog, or physog... is slang for your face! It's a word that has been around in Britain for at least 200 years, yet I have never heard anybody else use it.

"The source of all the slang forms is physiognomy. This came into English in the fourteenth century from Greek via French. The Greek derives from phusis, nature, and gnomon, a judge or interpreter. The first sense in English was that of judging a person’s character from his features. A little later, it added the idea of predicting a person’s future from his face; this seems a perilous method of divination, though not a surprising one, since prognosticators have tried everything from inspecting chicken entrails to studying the shape of clouds. However, the main sense of physiognomy has long been that of the facial features themselves.

The word has always been too long and scholarly-sounding to be welcome in the ears of English speakers. Even before they chopped it back to phiz they were slurring it. Shakespeare has the Clown in All’s Well That Ends Well assert that the Black Prince’s fisnomy was better known in France than England."

(Text taken from www.worldwidewords.org)