wish-wash
Language: English
Part of speech: noun
Forms: form: wish-washes
Senses: examples: text: Between the result of the above, and the ordinary wish-wash served as coffee, the difference is too great to be expressed.
ref: 1926, May Byron, May Clarissa Gillington Byron, Pot-luck, page 395:
text: The famous bohemian cafés, the Dôme, the Coupole and the Rotonde, still remained; the hooded iron stove still warmed the regulars settled beside the round tables from the wintry streets; the waiter, with the unvarying rudeness of Paris, served the "national coffee," that grayish-brown wish-wash which passed for coffee in Paris and which, like everything labeled "national," roused the suspicion that it wasn't what it was called but only resembled the real thing.
ref: 2000, Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary: 1944-1948, page 270:
text: They got 250 grams of bread and wish-wash for breakfast; in the evening, he who had worked got kasha, wish-wash, and bread.
ref: 2014, Paul R. Josephson, The Conquest of the Russian Arctic, page 135:
text: It consisted of bread and for the first course "the usual wish-wash” (balanda), “so-called soup in which several pieces of congealed cabbage floated.”
ref: 2017, Larry E. Holmes, Stalin's World War II Evacuations: Triumph and Troubles in Kirov, page 77:
glosses: Any weak, thin drink.
examples: text: It is a thing that fails altogether to interest; a wish-wash that only serves to pass the time.
ref: 1866, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Letters to Leipzig Friends, page 121:
text: They confined their sermons on Sunday to the decorous wish-wash in which average men treated in a harmless way subjects to which the people were indifferent.
ref: 1900 June, “The Old Gentleman”, in The Social Gospel, number 29, page 13:
text: it is a clearing away of the wish-wash which assumes that lack of national distinction is an international virtue.
ref: 1976, Laurie Thomas, Laurie F. Thomas, The Most Noble Art of Them All, page 65:
text: What I am doing is asking the senator to explain why Labor has come up with such wish-wash on this matter.
ref: 2000, Australia. Parliament. Senate, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard).: Senate, page 20486:
text: But then all of that seems to be a bunch of wish-wash—nothing more than lip service.
ref: 2017, Eric J. Bargerhuff, The Most Misused Stories in the Bible:
text: This simile is accurate only if the object of analysis is considered in a void, but in the context of "an old Germanic culture" the performance loses its value and becomes only a "wish-wash."
ref: 2021, Dagnosław Demski, Dominika Czarnecka, Staged Otherness, page 392:
text: And Ralph Vaughan Williams 'is now a solitary figure, for his influence has served to produce a steady trickle of pentatonic wish-wash.
ref: 2021, Simon Fenwick, The Crichel Boys: Scenes from England's Last Literary Salon:
glosses: Talk, music, or art, or ideas that lack any value, substance, originality, or meaning; dreck.
examples: text: Martha steadily turned and turned, and the cream within the snowy white sycamore box went 'wish-wash, wish-wash, wish-wash, playing, after all, a very delicious tune in the young farmer's ears, for it suggested yellow butter, and yellow butter suggested sovereigns, and sovereigns suggested home comforts and saving, and above all, the turning of that handle suggested the winning of just the very wife to occupy that home.
ref: 1883 November 17, George Manville Fenn, “The Rosery Folk”, in Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, volume 20, number 1038, page 726:
text: Then in the morning the washing of the deck; rush comes an engine pipe on the floor–ceases, is renewed, flourishes about, rushes again; then suddenly half a dozen brooms, wish-wash, wish-wash, scrib-scrub, scratching and roaring alternately.
ref: 2012, Michael Robinson, Newman's Quest for the One True Church, page A-55:
text: As they lay there, dazedly reliving the adventure that had brought them to this place, they heard the sound of the wish-wash-wish of lapping water.
ref: 2013, Sally Swain, Twisting and Turning, page 5:
text: Yet at these moments, that sound was not a single sound. There was another beat in the warmth of the wish-wash.
ref: 2014, Laurence Cramer, How To Look After Bert Reynolds:
glosses: The sound of liquid sloshing