Uh … come again? That line from “Brokeback Mountain,” spoken by Randy Quaid’s gruff rancher in reference to Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal’s sheep-tending, has left a lot of moviegoers wondering just what it means to “stem the rose.”

Now that the film has picked up three Golden Globes and looks Oscar-bound, it’s likely to confound even more people.

The movie’s distributor, Focus Features, had no opinion to offer on the term. A query called in to Annie Proulx, author of the original short story, was not returned.

Even those well-versed in gay and/or cowboy lingo have found themselves at a loss. The phrase has spawned a handful of lengthy online debates, such as the one at literary forum languagehat.com:

proulxfan: “Is there confusion about ‘stem the rose’? it’s a reference to homosexual sex.”

Glenn G: ” ‘Stemming the Rose’ is a euphemism for ‘struggling against love.’ Jack and Ennis were hired to protect the sheep from wolves. i.e., to stem the wolf attacks. Instead, they stemmed the rose – they were battling against homosexual desires.”

language hat: “I’m sorry, but that’s an extremely strained interpretation. I’m sure proulxfan is correct.”

Others posit that the term refers more to an onanistic practice – a visual suggested by stripping the thorns from the stem of a rose.

And a somewhat less jaded reader offered the opinion that perhaps it referred to the practice of pulling a rose’s petals off, i.e., wasting time.

One New York author chalks it up to the Wyoming writer’s habit of inventing cowboy-ese phrases:

“As with so much of Annie Proulx’s ‘prose,’ it probably doesn’t exist in real life,” says the novelist, who asked not to be named for fear of sparking a literary feud.

“She’s not only using a mixed metaphor, she’s inventing one: The verb ‘to stem’ means to stop, dam up. But used with plants, it means to remove the stem, which sounds like the opposite. Therein lies her bull-s- – – poetry.”

Whatever the definition, we’re hoping it catches on as a fun, ambiguous new hipster phrase:

“What did you do this weekend?”

“Oh, you know, caught a rock show, went to brunch, stemmed the rose.”

sara.stewart@nypost.com