What does hose mean in slang?

Early on that word of course was used to talk about the action of cleaning something off with a garden hose, but that is not the meaning you are asking about. I do not recall ever hearing that term used with that meaning before the 80's. What happened in the 80's?

Well, SCTV had a very funny (to us USAsians) skit with a couple of stereotypical Canadians called the McKenzie Brothers. They were constantly calling each other "hosers", and talking about how they had "hosed" each other. The skit went the 80's equivalent of viral, with an album (with a couple of singles that got good airplay) and a movie spun off it. The effect was that we (in the USA) got "hoser" added to the language as sort of a good-natured insult, or a way to make fun of Canadian speech.

Along with it, we borrowed the verb and adverb forms of "hosed" from the same source. Its a much more useful word, so it kinda lost its association with Canadians, and got fully adopted into the USA lexicon.

So where did Canadians come up with these words? That's where personal experience fails me, so I have to rely on online sources:

Like the very similar term hosehead, the term may have referred to farmers of the Canadian prairies, who would siphon gas from farming vehicles with a hose during the Great Depression of the 1930s.[citation needed] The expression has since been converted to the verb 'to hose' as in to trick, deceive, or steal - for example: "That card-shark sure hosed me." Hosed has an additional meaning of becoming drunk - for example: "Let's go out and get hosed." Another possible origin is derived from hockey slang. Before ice resurfacers, the losing team in a hockey game would have to hose down the rink after a game. Thus the term "hoser" being synonymous with "loser".

Personally I prefer the hockey explanation, but that doesn't make it right.

Currently the OED says there is no clear evidence of the term being used prior to its use by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, which to my mind leaves a strong possibility that they may have invented the slang themselves (although they are both Canadian, so they could well just be the first to record an existing slang).

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