I think it’s not a vulgarity, but, I can see it being a penile reference.
On my side, this commercial was on TV, but I cannot remember if it was cable or broadcast.
Anybody know?
Thanks,
hh
Hosed - phrase meaning and origin]
Personally, I’m wondering if it comes from the practice of siphoning gasoline using a hose. “You got hosed” = “somebody ganked your fuel”.
Well, those definitions don’t really match the context in which I’ve heard it. I’ve heard it more in the sense that getting hosed meant getting the raw end of the deal, getting cheated, or getting tricked, something similar.
Thanks for the answer,
hh
I don’t know the origin, but I know it’s used even in fairly formal contexts - I’ve seen the term used on news channels and political websites. So even if the origin is vulgar it can’t be a vulgar phrase nowadays…
Just to be safe, you may want to switch to the completely non-offensive term, “boned.”
Right- that’s where the gas tank theory comes in.
If the origin is simply “hosed out,” it just refers to cleaning something out with powerful water hoses, which would be common enough in industrial sites. It could also have been influenced by the practice of breaking up demonstrations in the 1950s and 1960s by turning fire hoses on protesters.
The ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) approved, in a manner of speaking, of the ad and did sign off on the script (although there was a lot of electronic discussion of it going on about it from what I remember). My take was that in this context “hosed” basically meant “screwed” but the official decission from church headquarters was that it meant “tricked”. But mostly it all came down to dollars - Mountain Dew sold a lot of product with the ad and the ELCA got a big boost in the funds they needed to try to resurrect the Davey and Goliath series.
If you check around the closed meetings/archives of Ecunet, some of the old discussions may still be available in zip form.
Bob and Doug McKenzie called each other and other people hosers derisively quite frequently, and it isn’t a stretch from there to a hoser hosing people.
So, in closing, getting hosed is kind of vulgar, but not very in the grand scheme of things, so take off, eh?
On the show SCTV, the segment about The Great White North, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas would talk in Canadian accents about hosers and getting hosed.
I presume it was the equivalent of British bugger all, etc. being a homosexal reference where that wasn’t considered beyond the pale in ordinary company.
TV news and US political commentary has been pretty vulgar for a long time.
Wiki and other sites attribute hoser (and hosehead) to the rural practice of siphoning gas from cars.
To get “hosed” used as a verb, has slang origins in four different senses==
- Military, going back to 1917. To riddle with automatic weapon fire.
- Student. To curry favor with.
- Police and Underworld. To beat with a rubber hose.
- Getting cheated or victimized, and also vulgar as “to copulate with.”
Let’s stop overlooking the obvious. To get hosed means you got screwed, you got fucked, you got the hose up the ol’ wazoo! You can spin it all you want but it still means the same thing. You got fucked!
Not to get too far off the track, but what the hell do you all think the expression “sucks” means? You hear it all the time nowadays. This sucks. That sucks. You suck. I suck. He sucks. She sucks. Everything sucks. It means “sucks cock” and don’t try to tell me anything different. It might be in the mainstream but don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining. Both expressions are indeed vulgar in their origin regardless of how much they are watered down by popular usage.
It is if you do it right. 
What you hear nowdays doesn’t always mean that’s where it started or meant when it started.
Case in point, the “that sucks” you hear today probably started/came from “sucks to be you” from the turn of the Century. Probably not sexual at all.
No kidding? That completely surprises me. But that seems to be predicated on “sucks” having some negative meaning at the Turn of the Century. Was “sucks” used in other contexts then (other than sucking on candy or nipples or whatever)?
Good lord man! The “turn of the century” was less than nine years ago! “Sucks” means fellatio. That’s what it meant in 2001 and that’s what it meant in 2000 and 1999, and 1998, etc. We’re talking about vulgar expressions. Getting “hosed” is vulgar. “Sucking” is vulgar. We’re dealing in facts and it is what it is.
“Your grandmother sucks eggs.”
Anyway, listen to samclem; he actually knows what he’s talking about. Common sense can be misleading; counterintuitive as it may be, the evidence collected by those who study this sort of thing academically does indicate that the relevant sense of “sucks” quite likely did not, in fact, originally have anything to do with fellatio.
I suppose the phrase is actually “go teach your grandmother to suck eggs”. My edit message is made even more prophetic…