The phrase “throw the baby out with the bathwater” originated in Germany and warns against discarding the good along with the bad. It comes from a time when Europeans rarely bathed and the water became dirty, making it possible to lose a child in the murky water. The term reminds us to avoid hasty decisions and to take time to evaluate a situation before acting.
The phrase “throw the baby out with the bathwater” appears to be of German origin, and essentially means that the good is not to be discarded along with the bad out of carelessness or haste. Before you get a mental picture of flying babies and bathwater, it should be added that this term has always been used as a metaphor to suggest that people shouldn’t rush to hasty decisions, not that the parents would actually throw their baby out.
No one is quite sure when the Germans first started saying that you shouldn’t throw your baby with the bathwater, but by the 1600s the term was common enough that astronomer Johannes Kepler quoted it in a way that suggested he assumed babies his readers knew what he was talking about. From Germany, the slang term spread to France and then to England. In 1853, Thomas Carlyle mentioned the need to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and also referred to the fact that the proverb was of German origin.
One might reasonably wonder how it is possible that people could even imagine that someone could mistakenly throw the baby out with the bathwater. The explanation for this term lies in the fact that Europeans seldom bathed after the Middle Ages, for a variety of reasons; many people, for example, thought bathing was unhealthy and avoided it except on rare occasions. When people bathed, they filled a large tub with water heated on the stove, and the whole family took turns, with the oldest going first.
By the time small children reached the bathtub, the water would have been lukewarm and quite dirty, thanks to previous bathers. One can easily imagine a child slipping into the water and being obscured by the muddy darkness, although since someone had to be present to bathe the child, it is unlikely that the child would have slipped completely below the surface, or that anyone would have dumped baby when emptying the tub, as most people keep track of where their babies are. The image of tossing the murky contents of the bath without first getting the baby out would have been compelling to Europeans living in this era, even if it never happened.
This slang term refers to the idea that hasty decisions can sometimes lead to dire consequences. Sometimes you need to take a break to find the good and the bad in a situation before making a choice about what to do; in other words, get the baby out of the tub so you don’t throw him away.
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