Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. thick and bad beer; occas. inferior wine, or tea.

1604		Dekker Honest Whore Pt 1 II i: flu.: Plague, not for a scald pottle of wine. math.: Nay, sweete Bellafronte, for a little Pigs wash.
1698		N. Ward ‘Sot’s Paradise’ in Writings (1704) 29: All Grunting o’er their Hogwash-Ale like Swine.
1709		N. Ward Compleat and Humorous Account of Remarkable Clubs (1756) 79: The Sham-Heroes were met over their diminutive Pewterkins of treakly Hogwash.
1712		J. Arbuthnot Hist. of John Bull 27: Your brewer sells you hog-wash.
1785, 1788, 1796		Grose Classical Dict. of the Vulgar Tongue.
a.1790		C.Dibdin ‘A Hog who has been an Alderman’ in Songs (1842) 61/2: If on ven’son and wines / Or on hog-wash one dines, / At last ’tis but eating and drinking.
1815		‘Anti-Starvation Song’ 🎵 Instead of Pitt’s dear Hog-wash We shall have old sterling Beer.
1843		S. Aus. Register 13 Sept. 2/2: If we are to brew our own beer, we must do it well. The poorest will not drink hogwash [...] and we must endeavour to remove the prejudice against Colonial beer.
1855		Hobarton Mercury (Tas.) 17 Sept. 2/2: A sub-inspectopr ought to be content with [...] any sort of hogwash; just as a superior officer drinks wine, whilst his inferiors drink small beer.
1880		Sydney Morn. Herald 20 Oct. 5/3: There is hogwash and hogwash — alcoholic hogwash, vinous hogwash, colonial beer hogwash, and bipedal hogwash.
1886		Mercury & Wkly Courier (Vic.) 12 Mar. 2/7: Draught beer, if kept from Saturday until it is required on Sunday, transforms itself into unmitigated hogwash.
1899		W. Aus. Sun. Times (Perth) 12 Feb. 8/3: Hogwash we may occasionally drink.
1906		Gadfly (Adelaide) 18 July 18/2: For the last month the bungs have been retailing all the hog-wash in the cellars. Some of them had to close at 9 o’clock, as the supply of wallop had petered out, such was the demand for a final skinful.
1906		Sun. Times (Perth) 3 June 4/7: [of tea] She knocked ofi two feeds an’ three quarts o’ the hog-wash.
1914		Kipling ‘Friendly Brook’ in Diversity of Creatures (1917) 62: He won’t tech no publican’s hogwash acrost the bar.
1916		Joyce Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 8: They said they could not drink the tea; that it was hogwash.
1922		Joyce Ulysses 702: He makes his money easy Larry they call him the old mangy parcel he sent at Xmas a cottage cake and a bottle of hogwash he tried to palm off as claret.
1923		Sun. Times (Perth) 7 Oct. 205/5: The drunk threw a moist arm around my scandalised neck and wafted over me a whiff of hogwash.
1923		T. Boyd Through the Wheat 53: Wine? You call that red hog-wash wine?
1933		‘William Juniper’ True Drunkard’s Delight.
1933		Townsville Daily Bull. (Qld) 3 June 12/7: ‘There’s a couple of bottles of beer in the cart.’ The chap who will give hogwash away these times must be good-hearted.
1942		W. Faulkner Go Down Moses 28: The hog swill which George had begun to turn out two months ago and call whisky.
1946		(con. 1912) B. Marshall George Brown’s Schooldays 23: The cretin pays the scholar five shillings for enabling him to sell his hogwash and make a fortune out of public credulity.
1957		F. King Man on Rock 245: ‘O.K. Some more of this hogwash.’ He held out his tankard.
1966–70		in DARE.

2. (also hogswaddle) nonsense, rubbish.

1877		Beltmont Chron. (St Clairsville, OH) 30 Aug. 2/2: The President expects to drizzle the last of his oratorical hogwash on the defenseless heads of New England farmers.
1878		Lancaster Gaz. 11 Sept. 3/1: Very many towns have [...] consumed the hog wash and wallowed in the mire of corruption.
1880		see sense 1.
1884		(con. c.1840) ‘Mark Twain’ Huckleberry Finn 213: Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash I never see it freshen up things so.
1894		Bruce Herald 4 May 6/7: The ‘Verse’ was labelled variously ‘hog-wash,’ ‘flapdoodle mixture,’ ‘slumgullion,’ etc.
1894		Truth (Sydney) 8 Apr. 1/1: The hogwash spouted by the Parliamentary aspirants [...] is enough to scare any capable man out of the political arena.
1895		Dly Gaz.for Middlesborough 27 May 2/5: An unlimitwed quantity of what has been called by a philosopher ‘hog’s wash’.
1901		Bulletin (Sydney) 14 Dec. 35/1: Some real gen-u-ine pills is that mild in their effect they can’t be felt. Consequence is, they’re put down as hogwash.
1910		Ranch (Seattle) 1 July 12/2: We escape publishing a good deal of the hogwash that gets by the best of poultry paper editors.
1919		E. Pound letter Apr. in Paige (1971) 150: The spirit of the young man of the Augustan Age, hating rhetoric and undeceived by imperial hog-wash.
1926		E. Hemingway letter 2 Jan. in Baker Sel. Letters (1981) 188: Mark Twain wrote great, vast quantities of Hog Wash.
1934		E. Raymond Child of Norman’s End (1967) 203: It’s mere hogwash.
1943		H.A. Smith Life in a Putty Knife Factory (1948) 130: They spew out hogwash and sheep-dip from day to day, and they accept large sums of money for their daily drool.
1954		(con. 1940s) T.A.G. Hungerford Sowers of the Wind 28: Hell, they fed you that hogwash, too?
1963		K. Williams Diaries 23 Apr. 212: Lot of fuss in the papers & crowds in town for this wedding of Princess Alexandra. What a load of old hogwash.
1969		C.B. Hopper Sex in Prison 117: He looks upon the new vocational programs as ‘hogwash’.
1981		J. Ellroy Brown’s Requiem 206: Cathcart called the ‘fourth man’ story ‘pure hogwash’.
1990		J. Healy Streets Above Us (1991) 140: We shall be making a very positive statement against all that middle-class hogwash.
2000		M. Collins Keepers of Truth 269: Hogwash is what that is!
2005		J. Stahl I, Fatty 89: Sometimes I almost believed this hogswaddle.
2010		F. Dennis in Big Issue 27 Sept.-3 Oct. 19/1: A load of hogwash - I was drunk.