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Dr. Bill sent me a link to Take Our Word For It, and though I couldn't find what I was looking for, I did find:
What is the origin of hogwash? We are trying to settle a dispute among co-workers.
Ah, here we are again, mediators in workplace disputes. We should start a human resources business! As for hogwash, it is simply wash for the pigs. Wash in this sense is "swill", or "liquid or partly liquid food refuse from the kitchen". It's basically a bucketful of kitchen scraps and leftovers, and when given to the pigs that many country families raised once upon a time, it came to be known as hogwash. Eventually, hogwash came to apply to anything that was worthless, then worthless or bad writings, and now it seems to have taken on the meaning of "untruths". The word is first recorded with the literal sense in about 1440 (when it was spelled hoggyswasch - what a great word!), and the figurative meaning is first seen in the written record in 1712.
I only heard it called slop, or pig slop. It also became a verb: slopping the pigs. 'Most all table scraps went into the slop bucket, which at feeding time had a little milk and a lot of water added. One thing the pigs didn't get were watermelon rinds; they were tossed over the barb-wire fence into the cow pasture--after the seed-spitting contests were over, of course! Mercy, those were some good times! I remember it being hot in the summers, but I was having too much fun to care. Now I'm old and decrepit, and I miss out on all kinds of things because I think I'll get hot. Sigh.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Granddaddy Percy's pigs were fed every day with "pig slops," too. And, yes, we "slopped" the pigs. Pig slop had a nice, fresh kind of scent since it was put out right after a meal had been eaten. I liked pouring the bucket out over the pig trough when I was a little girl because those pigs seemed to get so much enjoyment grunting their happy little continuous grunts over what I'd poured out for them. We, too, added milk to the pig slops. Nobody ever said, "Soo-ee," however. We just said, "Here, pig, pig, pig..."
I think we're ready for another round of Hogwash. Where is that tsuwm? "Oh, tsuwm? Soo-ee....? Tsuuuuuu---uwmeeeeeee?"
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My father made a house visit to a pig farmer. The son said his father was down back
with the pigs. "You'll know him. He's got his hat on."
And of course, if you have pigs with class, you have to speak French to them.
"Suis, Suis, Suis!"
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Carpal Tunnel
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don't be disgruntled, WW; teD has started another round of hogwash® as we speak.
by the way, I'd like to take this opportunity to push another fine underused positive root:
gruntle - to put in good humor
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear tsuwm: and what, pray tell, is the etymology of "gruntle"?
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Pooh-Bah
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Now, to me, "hogwash" has always meant the great briny ocean. It was more popularly styled "the hoggin" (or, indeed, "the 'oggin!") and was that on which sailors sail and occasionally fall in and drown.
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thank you so much for asking, dr. bill. originally it was formed from grunt plus the diminutive or frequentive ending and had the sense of uttering a grunt; from there it shifted in meaning to grumble or complain. but this usage died out and the word has returned as a back-formation from disgruntle and meaning the opposite thereto; i.e., to put in good humor. but what goes around comes around in this case, as we must ask ourselves "when is it that pigs grunt"?
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Pigs grunt when they're gruntled. I've heard 'em and I've seen 'em, too. Pigs is mostly gruntled beings. Rare is the pig what's disgruntled, and, was he be so, him wouldn't grunt at all. Him would be a disgrunted disgruntled piggy boy.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Pigs are so smart that psychologists do not use them in experiments, because the pigs can
figure out what the experiment is about, and skew the data hopelessly.
They are basically good natured. But a sow with little ones is not to be trifled with. If
you hurt a little one and it squeals, Mama goes on the warpath instantly and can be very
dangerous. One sow we had could lift a log a foot in diameter and almost twenty feet long
that I hitched to bottom of wire fence to keep her from going under it, and with her snout
toss it three feet into the air. Awsome power. We never kept boars, though. I didn't want
to get slashed.
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I remember as a child, a day when they made all the kids in the neighborhood go indoors because a big sow was loose. a few hundred pounds of disgruntled grunter...
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