‘They asked me if I wanted to wash up before we even went in to dinner,’ my husband recalled with mock horror of a visit to America some years ago. He doesn’t get out much.
It is true that Americans use wash up differently from us, to mean washing your hands (and perhaps face while you’re at it) rather than the plates after a meal. Of course washing your hands might be a euphemism for that other euphemism of going to the lavatory.
Now there is an outbreak of wash-up in management lingo. We must learn to live with it. Annoyingly, management-speak turns perfectly good phrases into weapons of time-wasting theory. Anyway, after some team project, a meeting is arranged to see what went well, what went badly and what could have gone better. (Never mind that they might not know.)
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