dirty
adj.— «The secret services create what’s called the “bubble,” a secure area where the candidate is. But once you’re in the bubble you can’t leave. The term for people outside it is “dirty,” meaning that you could have a weapon or someone could have given you something. Everyone who is in that stadium is clean, so you’re kind of limited to stay in the bubble, travelling around in this little sterile movement.» —“My America, Christopher Morris: the strange world of US political campaigns” by Ruby Russell Telegraph (United Kingdom) Sept. 27, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Nell from Virginia Beach, Virginia, remembers her great-grandfather and her grandmother using the phrase as clean as seven waters to mean “spotlessly clean.” The word waters in this case is analogous to washes or rinses, so being cleaned...
A prison employee wants to know about the term shank, that name for sharp weapons made with toothbrushes and pieces of metal. It derives from shank in the sense of the type of animal bone historically used in weapon making. This is part of a...