Since about 6AM this morning, on the 200-something RSS feeds I stay on top of, there have been maybe 15 new posts in total. Normally, you’d expect upwards of 75 on a Sunday morning. Then again, one of them did include the phrase “the wheels of justice have caught up to hamsters,” so I’m not counting it as a total wash.
Here, I’ll add something interesting to the Internet I found from the Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:
I just wrote above that my experience with my feeds this morning was not a “wash.” To use wash in this way is to hearken back to WWI US Naval slang, where to “wash-out” an order was to declare the mission a failure or a neutralized position (i.e. the net benefit does not prevail). This both refers to what can happen to objects on deck when a wave hits a ship, but is thought to be more accurately derived from the method by which orders were transcribed on ships at sea. As orders that were taken from radio message or signal flags from the shore or other boats, the orders were taken down on a slate. When an order was cancelled, it would be washed off that slate, hence the order being a “wash-out.” At first it was used as a verb (e.g. “a lot of the new recruits were washed-out from basic training,”) and later became used as a noun.
There. Now go impress your trivia night friends.
