Tales of Harper, short stories and poems
about the fictional town of Harper, Mississippi is available on Amazon Kindle
Harper Lake
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Hog Wash
Last week Silas Ministral, a fellow who never lets an idea (good or bad) go to waste, was listening to Bingo Whitlow talking about something he heard a politician say on the television. "That was a bunch of hogwash," said Bingo. That got Silas to thinking and that afternoon he came into the library where I volunteer and asked for a book on hogs. He told me he had an idea to build a hog wash right here in Harper. I told him I thought the expression hog wash came from the fact that washing hogs was useless since they live in mud. But lo and behold Silas found that people do have a need to wash hogs before they crate them up to ship them of to their final reward. He made a list right then and there of what he would need including the kind of soap preferred by most hog washers and left all full of pep and vigor. Yesterday I saw him go by with a large bathtub on the back of his truck and this morning I went out to his farm to check on his progress. I found him in his side yard digging a hole to deposit the tub in. He said he planned to make walls on each side and have a strip of concrete with showers for the final rinse. Hmmmm. I'll let y'all know.
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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.
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