A lecturer in business law in St. Cloud, Minnesota, is astonished to discover his students are unfamiliar with throw the baby out with the bathwater, meaning “to accidentally get rid of the good while getting rid of the bad.” You can find out pretty much everything you could ever possibly want to know about this phrase from an article by Wolfgang Mieder. This is part of a complete episode.
More from this show
According to Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English (Bookshop|Amazon) by Ben Yagoda, the word smarmy, meaning “unctuous” or “ingratiating,” may come from a 19th-century magazine contest, in which readers sent in...
Mary Beth in Greenville, South Carolina, wonders: Why do we say four-oh-nine for the number 409 instead of four-zero-nine or four-aught-nine? What are the rules for saying either zero or oh or aught or ought to indicate that arithmetical symbol...