Throw Out the Baby With the Bathwater Examples

The phrase to throw the babe out with the bathwater means to discard something valuable forth with other things that are undesirable.

Information technology is a loan translation from the German language phrase das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten , literally to empty out the child with the bath, first recorded in 1512. For instance, in German Literature, translated from the German of Wolfgang Menzel ¹ . Past C. C. Felton ^two (Boston, Massachusetts – 1840), the translator ^two added the following note to this sentence:

Hengstenberg is intolerant, and throws abroad the wheat with the crust.*
* Schüttet das Kind mit dem Bade aus; literally "empties out the baby with the bath."—Transl.

ⁱ Wolfgang Menzel (1798-1873), German language poet, critic and literary historian
² Cornelius Conway Felton (1807-62), American educator

The following explanations and illustration are from "(Don't) Throw The Babe Out With The Bath H2o": The Americanization of a German Proverb and Proverbial Expression, by Wolfgang Mieder and Wayland D. Manus, published in Western Folklore (California Folklore Gild – Claremont, California) of October 1991:

[The German phrase] had its first written occurrence in Thomas Murner'south (1475-1537) versified satirical book Narrenbeschwörung (1512), which contains as its 80-first short affiliate entitled "Das kindt mit dem bad vß schitten" (To throw the baby out with the bath water) a treatise on fools who by trying to rid themselves of a bad thing succeed in destroying whatever good there was as well. In seventy-half-dozen rhymed lines the proverbial phrase is repeated three times as a folkloric leitmotif, and there is besides the beginning illustration of the expression as a woodcut depicting quite literally a woman who is pouring her baby out with the bath water […].

Murner as well cites the phrase repeatedly in later works and this rather frequent utilize might be an indication that the proverbial expression was already in oral currency towards the terminate of the fifteenth century in Germany.

Wolfgang Mieder and Wayland D. Mitt as well explicate that the German phrase was then used by the German Protestant theologian and reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546), and by such authors as Jörg Wickram (1505-62), Johannes Nas (1534-90), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Andreas Gryphius (1616-64), Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-92), Gottfried Baronial Bürger (1747-94), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Jeremias Gotthelf (1797-1854), Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander (1803-79), Otto von Bismarck (1815-98), Theodor Fontane (1819-98), Thomas Isle of mann (1875-1955), Heinrich Böll (1917-85), and Günter Grass (1927-2015).

The Scottish historian and political philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) elaborated on his ain clumsy English language translation of the German phrase in Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (London, 1853), when he argued that white people who hold blackness servants should make a commitment to them for life, since whatsoever shorter arrangement would appear to be corruption—in other words, he argued that the establishment of slavery should be civilised and improved, but that the slaves themselves should non be given their freedom:

If the Black Gentleman is born to be a servant, and, in fact, is useful in God's creation merely as a servant, then let him rent not by the month, but past a very much longer term. That he exist "hired for life,"—really here is the essence of the position he now holds! Consider that matter. All else is abuse in it, and this simply is essence;—and the abuses must be cleared abroad. They must and shall! Aye; and the thing itself seems to offering (its abuses one time cleared away) a possibility of the most precious kind for the Black homo and for us. Servants hired for life, or by a contract for a long period, and not easily dissoluble; so and not otherwise would all reasonable mortals, Blackness and White, wish to hire and to be hired! I invite you to reflect on that; for you lot volition find it true. And if true, information technology is important for u.s., in reference to this Negro Question and some others. The Germans say, "You lot must empty out the bathing-tub, but not the baby along with it." Fling out your muddied water with all zeal, and set it careering down the kennels; only try if you tin can go on the little kid!
How to abolish the abuses of slavery, and save the precious thing in information technology: alas, I do not pretend that this is easy, that information technology can be washed in a twenty-four hours, or a single generation, or a unmarried century: only I exercise surmise or perceive that information technology will, past straight methods or by circuitous, need to exist done (non in the Due west Indian regions alone); and that the one way of helping the Negro at present (Distressed Needlewomen, &c., being quite out of our reach) were, by piously and strenuously beginning it. Begun it must be, I perceive; and carried on in all regions where servants are born and masters; and are not prepared to become Distressed Needlewomen or Demerara Niggers, only to live in some human being style with one another. And truly, my friends, with regard to this globe-famous Nigger question,—which maybe is louder than it is big, after all,—I would advise you to attack it on that side. Endeavour against the dirty water, with an eye to save the baby! That will be a quite new bespeak of assault; where, it seems to me, some real do good and victory for the poor Negro, might before long, be accomplished; and something else than Demerara freedom (with its rum-bottle and no breeches,—'baby' quite gone down into the kennels!), or than American stump-oratory, with mutual exasperation fast rising to the desperate pitch, might be possible for philanthropic men and women of the Anglo-Saxon type.

The phrase was and then used in The Dial: A Monthly Magazine for Literature, Philosophy and Religion (Cincinnati, Ohio) of February 1860; this magazine made the post-obit comment on an commodity, titled On Prayer, published that month:

We do not, of course, hold ourself responsible for articles actualization in The Dial which we accept not written; and if nosotros take especial find of whatever article, information technology is not because we endorse the rest, just because it has suggested some statements which we think important to the crusade of truth. […]
The defect of the above article seems to united states to be that, in the language of a homely German language proverb, it throws out the infant with the bath.

In the following Peanuts drawing, by Charles Monroe Schulz (1922-2000), published in the Herald and News (Klamath Falls, Oregon) of Lord's day xviii^th October 1959, when Linus uses the phrase while talking to Charlie Brown, little Sally gets frightened, every bit she misses the figurative significant of the expression and understands it as a direct threat to herself :

I'm inclined to hold with you, Charlie Dark-brown…
Simply on the other hand we must be cautious in our thinking…
We must be careful not to "throw out the infant with the bath"
[turning to Sally] Please pardon the expression

The post-obit political cartoon by Herblock (Herbert Lawrence Cake – 1909-2001), published in The Sheboygan Press (Sheboygan, Wisconsin) of Wednesday iv^th March 1981, alludes both to the phrase and to Ronald Reagan ³ 's ideas of a decentralised government. With the captionEverybody Set up For The Baby-And-Bathwater Toss?, this cartoon shows a member of the Reagan Team with a starting pistol lifted up loftier while three bureaucrats are fix—and eager—to throw three babies through the window, the three tubs beingness labelled Federal Regulations, Federal Programs, and Federal Agencies:

³ Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911-2004), American Republican statesman, forty^th president of the Usa (1981-89)

The phrase was borrowed into French equally jeter le bébé avec fifty'eau du bain . It is likely to be a loan translation from the English version, for two reasons: British English and American English have a much greater influence on French than High german has, and, had it been borrowed from High german, enfant (translating the German language substantive Kind , meaning kid) would probably accept been used instead of bébé .

The earliest instance of the French phrase that I have institute is from an interview of the German philosopher, theologian and educator Georg Pitch (1913-82) in L'Limited ⁴ va plus loin avec [= L'Express goes farther with] Roland Barthes, Fernand Braudel, Georges Friedmann, Friedrich Hacker, François Jacob, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Arthur Koestler, Claude Lévi-Strauss, André Lichnerowicz, Konrad Lorenz, Marshall McLuhan, Herbert Marcuse, André Martinet, Jean Piaget, Georg Picht, Alfred Sauvy, Pierre Thuillier, Alan Watts (Éditions Robert Laffont – Paris, 1973); L'Express asked the following question:

A vos yeux, donc, les hippies et les contestataires extrémistes jettent, en quelque sorte, « le bébé avec 50'eau du bain » ?
     translation:
In your eyes, therefore, hippies and anti-institution extremists throw, as it were, "the baby out with the bathwater"?

⁴ L'Express is a French weekly news magazine founded in 1953.

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Source: https://wordhistories.net/2018/11/23/throw-baby-bathwater/

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