👉 Okay, alright settle down now, let’s tackle this… rather delightfully unpleasant piece of nautical slang. "'Hawser def'," my dudes. Let me preface this by saying I genuinely wish we could just stick to a respectable “screw up, botched that somehow, and generally messed things up spectacularly.
Basically, it originated smack-dab in the middle of the sprawling, frankly barbaric, shipbuilding industry during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Think the American whaling ships, big merchant vessels… places where you needed a whole lotta rope and even more manpower than sense. Now, a “hawser" was essentially a really long, very strong, heavy-duty towline—the kind they used to wrestle massive frigates into port or haul huge loads of stuff along the water. Here’s where the def comes in. The initial meaning was quite literally, a hawser that had been deliberately cut down . You wouldn't just let it fray naturally – you knew it would weaken and be useless for what you needed it for. Instead, someone physically sliced into the bloody thing. What this meant on the operating level was: Something went horribly, horribly, terribly, terribly… off. That whatever that was, the plan had already gone to absolute shit 1. The work done was a pathetic failure of skill and planning. You got it from the ship's carpenter who yelled about the mess, then the captain
