In the wash
July 14, 2006 by Dave Earley
Filed under Uncategorized
I just pulled a load of clothes out of the washing machine and found at the bottom two bulldog clips I had been looking for.
Despite many times in the past having found coins (bonus!) and mulched paper (drat!) I had forgotten about, they for some reason had never, before tonight, made me think of the phrase “it will all come out in the wash”. But tonight my addled mind made the connection.
I wondered, did things ‘come out in the wash’ before electric washing machines, or is this a phenomenon, and a saying, that originated in the mid-20th century?
I don’t know, and don’t have the time or inclination to search the internet to find out, but I did wonder.
Thanks. A link to where you got that?
IT’LL ALL COME OUT IN THE WASH — “We’ll find out sooner or later what’s going on, and we needn’t worry about it now. The literal thought is that dirt on an item of clothing will be dissolved eventually in the washing. An old form of the saying, used by Cervantes in ‘Don Quixote’ (1612), is: ‘All will away in the bucking.’ To ‘buck’ cloth or clothing was to steep it in lye as a form of bleaching. Henry Festing Jones, who collaborated with the novelist Samuel Butler, once quoted Butler as saying in 1876: ‘As my cousin’s laundress says, ‘It will all come right in the wash.’” From “Dictionary of Cliches” by James Rogers (Ballantine Books, New York, 1985).