Slang “House”

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Whitney. I’m calling from Tallahassee, Florida.

Whitney. Okay, great. We’re glad to have you. Whitney, what’s up?

Okay, so the term that I’m calling about today is housing.

And I just heard the term a few weeks ago from my boyfriend and his friend group,

And they use it to mean, like, to finish something really fast.

Like, for example, they use it a lot to say, like, I need to house this beer.

Like, I’m going to house this sandwich, like, in those terms.

Really?

And that means to just consume it completely?

Right.

To, like, finish it off because usually you use it in a term, like, in the way that, like, we’re about to leave.

So we have to, like, house this beer.

House the beer.

Yeah, just to slam it or to gorge yourself on a pizza, like, to eat the entire thing.

Right, exactly.

So you could house a pizza.

That’s really interesting. I’ve got a couple ideas on this, but nothing solid.

There is a use of house in hip hop or in rap lyrics that means destroy or defeat completely.

And the reason I think it’s connected, because there’s also a use of just the verb destroy to mean I destroyed that pizza, meaning I ate it.

Or I destroyed that 12 pack, meaning I drank it all.

And you overcame it. You overcame the barrier of trying to get all that food into your body.

You owned it.

You owned it. Yeah, pwned it.

And so that’s one theory. It’s kind of a stretch, though, not 100% sure. Probably a little more

Interesting, but even less likely, is the fact that in the Scots language, they’ve long had a

Verb hose, H-O-S-E, which means to seize greedily. And it’s usually said of fish who are seizing

Bait, like the carps hosed my worm, right? The fish seized the bait just like that, just took it.

And over time, it’s become generalized to apply to other animals and to humans as well.

So if you hose food, you’re just shoveling it in.

Wow, that’s pretty interesting.

But the connection for the Scots is really unlikely.

There’s not very much history of it.

I think it’s far more likely that it’s a modern slang variation of hose, meaning to destroy or to defeat from hip-hop.

I’m sorry, not to hose, to house.

In hip-hop, it’s house.

So if you get housed or housed, are you drunk?

If it’s like your 10th beer or so, you might be drunk.

But if it’s like your first beer and you’re just trying to leave and you just house a beer,

Then you might get drunk. It depends, I guess.

Yeah, but the verb housed here doesn’t mean to get drunk.

It just might be a byproduct of housing food or housing alcohol.

There are some other variations of house, verb, and hip-hop that have kind of fallen by the wayside

That might be worth mentioning here, and these are from the Historical Dictionary of American Slang.

And one of them is to take or to steal.

So you might house a pizza, meaning you took it to eat all of it.

And the other one is house to excite and impress.

So perhaps house to you’re impressing your audience by your rapacity and capacity, right?

Your ability to eat an entire extra large pizza.

And if you mentioned it, then it’s a really big pizza, right?

Yeah.

I apartment building that.

So those are my theories on that.

You know what?

We’re going to put the word out, though, Whitney, and see if we can find other people who know this slang verb, to house, meaning to eat or to gorge yourself.

I like it.

Or to drink quickly, and we’ll see what happens, okay?

Okay, that sounds good.

Thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Take care.

Yeah, thank you.

Sure.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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