If something’s clean as a whistle, that doesn’t mean it’s shiny and spotless like a silver whistle in a referee’s mouth. The idiom refers to a whistling sound: That piercing noise is super-bright and finely edged on the ear. This is part of a complete episode.
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“As dirty as a toy store whistle.” I had to laugh with you about being just the right height. When my son was about 4, we walked into a men’s room at a restaurant. The restroom was narrow and as we walked, single file, past the urinal, he spotted the pink deoderant “puck” and snatched it out, asking, “What’s this, Daddy?”
As noted by this a pipe culvert is some-times, -places called a whistle. Its intention is to pass water without intending to make a sound. That definition is not contained in the OxED.
With a couple in the low-water bridge below my dad’s house, this summer’s deluges has a whole different connotation on the concept of a clean whistle. I have had to clean their openings several times to aid the water flowing under the road rather than over the low-water bridge. Several times it was unsafe to cross and one should “Turn around; Don’t drown.”
So, “clean as a whistle” means something entirely different in this context.