"Drinking from a fire hose." I heard this expression today

[raccoon]

For the first time.

Can someone elucidate?

[yewberry]

1. Too much too fast.

Inundated to the point of being wasteful/ painful/ dangerous.

[TwilightZone]

2. Weird Al, 1989

I also recall this one at MIT, which was a couple years later.

https://metaist.com/blog/2010/05/origin-drink-from-fire-hose.html

It could certainly predate Al, but that's the one that comes to mind.

As yewberry noted, it basically means being overwhelmed by circumstances.

[marylandblue]

3. If you get a lot of something at once, but you can only absorb a little bit

Getting information on the Internet is often compared to drinking from a firehouse. Google any topic and you will get 10 million links. You can only read the top few and hope it has what you need, but it's still just a tiny taste of what is out there.

[Autumn]

4. Drinking from a fire house might rip your lips off I would think. That's a lot of force

coming out of that hose.

[True Dough]

5. Pretty sure Donald Trump coined that phrase

He's invented so many words and expressions, unlike any other human being in history!

[rurallib]

10. he will come up with it at the first 4th of July celebration in DC happening this year

I predict

[True Dough]

6. And hopefully the water doesn't exit your body

with the same force at which it entered!

[csziggy]

8. Not unless you're getting ready for a colonoscopy

[jrandom421]

7. It happens

when you're in a situation where information comes at you in such rapid torrents, it's like it's being shot at you by a high pressure fire hose. Your task is to absorb (or drink) this huge rapid torrent of information. It's like trying to drink (like we did as kids on summer days with the garden hose), but from a 6-inch fire hose, pumping water at 100 PSI.


It's a situation that happened to me, when I was hired by a company, and they literally put me in as the subject matter expert for the whole company on my first day. I had so much information from so many different people I had to absorb and understand, while at the same time, be the "expert" for other areas of the company. The people feeding information only had their piece of information, and it became my job to gather information from all these sources, and make it a coherent whole in my first week on the job.

[Pachamama]

9. I believe the new definition is to describe the experience we all are having daily as we have to

.....be bombarded with the lies and outrageous revelations about what Trump and his crime family have done just that day alone and the impossible task to trying to process it all.....

[eppur_se_muova]

11. Dates back to at least to the 70's ...

"Studying at MIT is like trying to get a drink from a fire hose" from HOTOGAMIT, the (unofficial?) student handbook.

cf "an embarassment of riches"