Feb 26, 2009
Laundry List
You often hear people talking about a speech as being nothing more than a "laundry list" of proposals or some such thing, and it occurs to me to wonder: who the hell needs to make a list to do their laundry? Anyone have any idea where the expression comes from?
We may have the Girl Scouts to thank for this one.
In the Austen novel Northanger Abbey, the heroine finds what she believes to be a medieval manuscript until, in the morning, she realizes it’s a laundry list. The person who would bring their clothes to a cleaner would get an itemized list of the items they’d handed over, so they could be sure to get all the items back. Don’t dry cleaners still do this?
Mine just scrawls, for example, “10 shirts” on the little slip. I guess I never thought of that as a laundry list, but of course you’re right!