Recently, while surfing that ocean of folderol we call the web, I got hung up on this particular bit of poppycock: that Al Capp, in his comic strip Li’l Abner, coined the word hogwash.
Baloney. Hogwash goes back to fifteenth-century Britain. First it meant semi-liquid pig-swill, then bad liquor, and then, a jumble of words.
That messy history has produced a fine-tuned compound. Hog for down-and-dirty, euphemism. With subverbal notes of , of .
