Bustle, an online newspaper ‘for and by women’, has published ‘six common phrases you didn’t know were sexist (that you’ll now want to ban from your vocabulary)’.
One of them is ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater’. By chance this phrase was used by Sir Ernest Gowers, the enemy of officialese and cliché, in his book H.W. Fowler: The Man and his Teaching. ‘We can,’ Sir Ernest wrote, ‘rid ourselves of those grammarians’ fetishes which make it more difficult to be intelligible without throwing the baby away with the bath-water’.
That would annoy someone called Julie Sprankles, a writer for Bustle. ‘The most popular theory is that in medieval times, an entire family would take a bath using the same tub water. The man of the house was always at the top of this heirarchy [sic], followed by any sons.
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