Will ‘hosepipe ban’ make it into the dictionary?

‘Got any ’ose?’ asked my husband, falling into his Two Ronnies ‘Four Candles’ routine, in which he likes to play not only the shopkeeper but also the customer, with disastrous results. In both the pantyhose and the garden hose in the sketch, the hose was originally the same word.

Hose meant the leggings or trousers our Germanic forefathers wore. In some contexts it long retained the archaic plural hosen. When Nebuchadnezzar in his rage commanded Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to be thrown into the burning fiery furnace, they were bound ‘in their coats, their hosen, and their hats’, according to the translation of 1611. In the pleasantly named A Pisgah-sight of Palestine (Pisgah referring to the summit of Mount Nebo from which Moses saw the Promised Land), written during the Civil War while waiting for things to get better, which they didn’t, Thomas Fuller explains that ‘by hosen we understand not stockins, but breeches’, which he thought Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego wore for warmth, ‘Babylon, being somewhat a more northern climate, and colder countrey then Iudea.’ Perhaps.

In a Latin glossary from about 1100, hose is the translation of caliga, the sandal-boot worn by Roman infantrymen, who gave the name Caligula (‘bootikins’) to the little boy who, aged 24, came to be emperor, resenting his nickname as a dishonour.

In the 14th century, to hose meant to provide a man with hose. Francis Thynne, the Elizabethean editor of Chaucer, noted that his name was French, ‘in Englishe signyfyinge one who shueth or hooseth a manne’.

As for ban, it began as the name for a proclamation or summons to arms. Later it applied to the proclamation of an excommunication and, with the conventional spelling banns, a formal notice of marriage. The ban on hosepipes falls in the same category in the OED as ‘a ban on the flesh of the horse as the food of Christian men’. The dictionary hasn’t got round to treating a hosepipe ban as a discrete thing, though the phrase crops up in its pages in a quotation illustrating the use of water company. I’m afraid there will be far more references in future to hosepipe bansthan to horseflesh bans.