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Wed 3 Jan, 2018 04:19 pm
How are you, guys?
Let me show you a conversation between two people.
It is the first day at work for one guy,
and the other, who has been working there, is showing him around.
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You'll be working under Alan Sinclair here.
At first, you may find the assignments a little unchallenging,
but that'll soon change as you appreciate how things wash here.
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Well, it isn't exactly a conversation between two persons,
because only one person was talking here.
Anyway, I had no troubling understanding what he said but just one part : wash.
From the context, what he meant was, I guess,
'how things go here', 'how things work here' or 'how things are done' and so on.
Supposing that 'wash' has similar meanings, I looked up some dictionaries,
hoping to find some evidence supporting my guess. And I failed.
The place where the conversation took place is just an ordinary office, not a swimming pool or any place near water.
Then what on earth made him choose to use the word 'wash' there?
Oh, those folks are British people.
Well, does the word 'wash' have some different meanings in England?
I can't figure this out for myself.
Please help me to get a better understanding of that puzzling word.
I'd appreciate any comment. Thank you.
Dialogue from "Match Point (2005), dir Woody Allen. In general, we mostly use the verb 'wash' to talk about cleaning things with water, often of the soapy kind. But you know how it is - expressions get coined. You can talk about 'how things wash up' to mean how some set of events ends (up). I would understand this: "Listen, bub, I'm gonna tell you how things wash around here", the big guy said on my first day at the (whatever) plant. It is a verb of process and action, readily adaptable for inclusion in figures of speech that folks (like movie scriptwriters) make up and which are readily understood at first hearing by native speakers. Lots of other verbs I can imagine also. Go, run, etc.
@centrox,
It could be understand as a newly-coined word, which is why I couldn't find
the exact meaning in the dictionary. That's your point, right?
Thank you for the answer. It helped me a lot.
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