As Clean as Seven Waters

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Good afternoon. This is Nell Weber from Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Hello, Nell. Welcome to the show. Hey, Nell. Thank you. In my family, my grandmother, and this started with my great-grandfather, who was a farmer, and he used the term as clean as seven waters.

Now, he had a dog, which he named Seven Waters, and somehow or another, we always assumed that’s where the expression came from.

He had a dog named Seven Waters? Yes, because that dog could clean a plate so clean that it looked like it had been washed. I’m just imagining him standing on the porch yelling for Seven Waters.

Oh, absolutely. He was a farmer who was a little bit land poor, but he had 13 children, so he had no lack of help. Child rich. Yes, absolutely. And one dog?

He had a pack of hunting dogs, but this dog would get there first and lick the plate. Absolutely, nobody had anything left on the plate to even sniff at.

Oh my gosh. I don’t know if I’ve met a dog that can’t do that. Yeah, I’m not sure that’s a special talent. So seven waters, clean as seven waters.

Martha, I got a feeling here that there’s more to it than the dog. Well, yeah, for sure. Well, let’s talk about the word waters here. I mean, usually water functions as a mass noun. You know, that term applies to nouns that designate something that’s usually impossible to count.

Examples of mass nouns would be sand or cutlery or literature. You know, usually those are not plural. And in this case, the word water functions as a count noun. It designates the use of water, that is, a rinse.

So seven waters, clean as seven waters, refers to each of seven consecutive uses of water, seven washes, seven rinses. It’s an interesting notion because there’s a reference to this kind of thing in the Bible. In 2 Kings, Naaman is told to wash seven times in the muddy Jordan River.

And at first he refuses, and then he goes along with it, and he’s healed of leprosy. And so seven traditionally symbolizes perfection. And if you’re washing seven times, then powerful things can happen.

And Grant is not just in that culture, right? No, it isn’t.

As a matter of fact, in Islam, there’s a tradition of seven waters as well. And it shows up in a variety of languages spoken in countries where Islam is a dominant religion.

For example, in Farsi, to wash with seven waters is a way of saying, as one reference book puts it, to perform one’s ablutions with great nicety and circumspection. And in Farsi, it sounds something like,

So the seven waters are either a literal or figurative perfection, like Martha said, or completeness. It ensures that something, maybe a person, a situation, a reputation is completely or perfectly clean.

And also in Kurdish, there is a saying or a proverb that’s something like, he is beyond seven waters, meaning he is beyond redemption, either literally beyond redemption of God or beyond redemption in a personal sense, like, oh, he’s a hopeless case, he’ll never change his ways.

Is this a common saying in English? I’ve never heard it anywhere else. No, but Martha, it’s interesting, isn’t it, that it goes back that there might be that common shared, like Islam and Judaism and Christianity all have that shared religious root.

And I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the seven waters is connected there, you know, that all of these cultures share these common religious influences.

Right. And if you look at old newspapers from the early part of the 20th century, sometimes you’ll see laundry services that advertise seven waters. That is, they’re supposedly rinsing your laundry seven times to get it super duper clean.

Oh, that’s something I really didn’t know. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for calling.

Call us again sometime and you take care of yourself, all right? All right. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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