The Rural Ethicist: “Oh, Hogwash!”
By Katharine Adams
July 2025
My doctor squinted at the tiny print on a prescription label she held, rotating it to and fro, muttering aloud its directions.
She paused, weighing the cautionary text. Then, an abrupt declaration.
“Oh, hogwash!” she flatly stated, a highly trained, team-leading specialist, embracing an old and folksy term for nonsense. It made me like her all the more.
PHOTO: Pig in Flight by KL Adams
Her blunt dismissal was in response to the label’s warning against applying different types of potent ointment at the same time, but because we weren’t mixing them, she reasoned the slather sauces could coexist in neighborly peace. And she was right. Her flat admonishment has stuck in my head, still entertaining me over the years. As a record-holder for deadpan snickers, her office tells it straight and doesn’t trifle with auxiliary, bedside-manner frivolity. She could be a stand-up comic—and in a sense, that’s part of who she is. A practitioner who’s super smart and funny? A treasure!
With origins centuries old, the term hogwash surely took a foothold in someone’s kitchen. In a sturdy linen apron, somebody was scraping soggy refuse off of cutting boards and plates into a pail intended to be hoisted out to the barn.
During my childhood in the seventies, this visual included an old 5-gallon bucket, scraps of Wonder bread, fusty cornmeal, egg shells and rotting fruit meant for “Nerf” and his pen-mates, happily snorting and rooting for their table-scrap gravy at our neighbor’s hillside farm.
It is a common assumption that “hogwash” originally referred to bathing a pig, an activity that may well have transpired on someone’s gentle farm, while an official was soon to arrive. All children, tea sets, dogs and things needed prettying up to herald their arrival.
But no, it did not refer to swine showers; instead, the suffix -wash is an old term for liquid refuse (not water used for washing, in the modern sense). Instead, hogwash refers to any leftover liquid soup or slop that humans would rather not consume, from either cooking or brewing.
In fact, slop can also be used as a verb: “I’m headed out to slop the hogs,” Jeb called out, lifting a pail laden with a uniquely tasty dinner.
My father, who always held an affection for word play, had a metal trash can in the cellar which he one day labeled, “SWILL.” Just to see his scrawl helped charm the chore of taking out the trash. In an offshoot, he taught me to fold over, crunch down and roll over the top half of a paper bag, forming a sturdy oval ring; it was to be labeled, “CARBAGE” and kept in one’s car. I did this for several years, in his honor. And behold—that bag never tipped over, having been engineered to hold up, unlike a typically wispy paper bag.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest known use of the word stemmed from the Middle English period (1150—1500). It evolved to become an American slang metaphor for “rubbish.” The term was used figuratively by the 18th century to describe insincere ideas or speech, or anything worthless or nonsensical—including “sorry drink” or bad liquor.
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is credited with popularizing the term hogwash in the United States. In an 1870 article for The Galaxy magazine, he wrote, “I will remark, in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is ‘hogwash.’”
Nabokov elaborated on creativity being 1% inspiration and 99% hard work, in this way: “Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.” In the same vein, James Victore said, “Inspiration is hogwash. My work comes directly out of my loves and hates. Muses don’t whisper in my ear, and ideas don’t flow over my body like a cool rain.”
After all this, it turns out a record album, a brewing company, a condiment, a sea salt company, a California Rosé and a “stain-removing powerhouse” soap, all items called “Hogwash,” are available. Maybe I’ll try some, chill out and detail-clean my delusions.
