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...
washlet n.— «Japanese bathrooms are the apotheosis of the nation’s fascination with both cleanliness and high-tech gadgetry. The toilet at Tokyo Midtown may have been a rather basic model of what is called a “washlet,” but its...
C diff n.— «We are told that 60,000 hospital patients this year will catch the superbug Clostridium difficile.…Cases of “C diff,” as it is known in the trade, have risen by 22 per cent in the past year, affecting more than...