Meaning:
A good hiding is a severe thrashing.
Background:
A good hiding is one of the phrases that we infer the meaning of without
really understanding. One can remember at school being threatened with a good
hiding by the teachers and working out pretty quickly from the context what
was being said. It never occurred to me to wonder why hiding, which everyone
knew meant `concealing oneself from view', should be used in a phrase meaning
a severe thrashing.
We rarely have use for it now but the verb hiding was used in the 18th
century to mean `flay - remove the hide from'. This wasn't in the sense of
beating but of removing a hide of an animal during slaughter.
From the early 19th century hiding began to be used to mean thrashing,
especially thrashing severe enough to remove the victim's skin. It was that
meaning that Basil Fawlty had in mind when he threatened and later thrashed
his ailing car.
An early example of the use of hiding to mean thrashing is found in The
[London] Times, October 1803:
At the bar of the Plough alehouse, when the deceased had challenged the
prisoner, and threatened to give him a good hiding.
That's the earliest example of `a good hiding' in print that I have found.
In the sporting world, when a contestant is facing a beating with nothing to
show for it, they are said to be on a hiding to nothing.
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
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My first good hiding was for stealing from the family cache and then losing 10
RMB, a sizeable sum in the 70s, in the dog days of the summer when I turned
five. The Dickensian drama has long become a treasured memory. Aunt and I still
laugh about it today.
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