Heading
1861. Hughes. Tom Brown at Oxford, ch. xxi., p. 223. 'He is churchwarden at home, and can't smoke anything but a long clay.'
1866. London Miscellany, 19 May, p. 235, col. 2. Surely these men, who win and lose fortunes with the stolidity of a mynheer smoking his clay yard, must be of entirely different stuff from the rest of us.
1871. Calverley, Verses and Tr. Ode Tobacco. Jones . . . daily absorbs a clay after his labours.
To moisten, soak, or wet one's clay, verbal, phr.—To drink. [Clay = the human body.]
1708. Brit Apollo, No. 80, 3, 1. We were moistening our clay.
1711. Addison, Spectator, No. 72, par. 9. To moisten their clay, and grow immortal by drinking.
1731. Fielding, Letter Writers, Act ii., Sc. 2. A soph, he is immortal, And never can decay; For how should he return to dust Who daily wets his clay?
1790. Rhodes, Bombastes Furioso. Moistening our clay and puffing off our cares.
1800. Morning Chronicle (in Whibley, p. 92). Cram not your attics With dry mathematics, But moisten your clay with a bumper of wine.
1836. Dickens, Pickwick, ch. xxxix., p. 345. Ever and anon moistening his clay and his labours with a glass of claret.
1837. Barham, I. L. (The Monstre Baloon). And they're feasting the party, and soaking their clay, With Johannisberg, Rudesheimer, Moselle, and Tokay.
1864. Lowell, Fireside Trav., 119. When his poor old clay was wet with gin. [m.]
Clean, adj. and adv. (colloquial
and expletive).—1. Entirely;
altogether; e.g., clean gone,
clean broke, etc. Employed
by the best writers until a recent
date, and scarce colloquial even
now.
1888. W. E. Henley. A Book of Verses, 'Ballade of a Toyokuni Colour Print.' Child, although I have forgotten clean, I know That in the shade of Fuji-*san, What time the cherry orchards blow, I loved you, once, in old Japan.
1890. Mark Rutherford ('Reuben Shapcott'), Miriam's Schooling, p. 11. The memory of the battle by the hill Moreh is clean forgotten.
2. Expert; smart.
1878. Charles Hindley, Life and Times of James Catnach. The cleanest angler on the pad, In daylight or the darky.
Clean-Out, verbal phr. (colloquial)—To exhaust; strip; 'rack'; or ruin. Fr., se faire lessiver.
1812. T. H. Vaux, Flash Dict. Cleaned out: said of a gambler who has lost his last stake at play; also, of a flat who has been stript of all his money.
1819. Thos. Moore, Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress, p. 38. All Lombard-street to ninepence on it, Bobby's the boy would clean them out!
1840. Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop, ch. xxix., p. He never took a dice-box in his hand, or held a card, but he was plucked, pigeoned, and cleaned out completely.
c. 1880. Broadside Ballad, 'When I was Prince of Paradise.' I introduced 'loo'—in an hour or two, I'd cleaned all their pockets right out.
Clean Potato, phr. (general).—The right thing. Of an action indiscreet or dishonest, it is said that 'It's not the clean potato.'
Clean Straw, subs. (Winchester College).—Clean sheets. [Before 1540 the beds were bundles of straw on a stone floor. At that date Dean Fleshmonger put in oaken floors, and provided proper beds, such as existed in 1871 in Third, and later in the case of the Præfect of Hall's unused beds in Sixth. The term has never been used, as stated by Barrère, in reference to mattresses of any kind, straw or other.]
Clean Wheat. It's the clean wheat, phr. (general), The
