wet work
2
9.9
- noun
- Offensive
:
operaciones de liquidación
- I got some wet work to get done.
Examples
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- Like I said, I don't do wet work.
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And that weird Irish guy that does his wet work for him?
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You know, the one who used to do your wet work.
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The question is whether or not you're willing to do wet work.
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You hired me to kill your wife... ...because you couldn't do the wet work yourself.
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Which means paying the Nigerian warlord to do wet works at some part of the supply chain.
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The bottom-line price for wet work is $25,000.
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Fate put two wet work operatives, twins, on a job in Bolivia, butchering my entire crew.
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The secretive agency was known for its involvement in wet work during various political conflicts.
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He was rumored to be an expert in wet work, having completed several high-profile missions undetected.
Synonyms
1
9.9
An illegal secret job to kill or hurt someone for an organization
How Violent
Surface Forms
Morphology
wet + work
The meaning 'covert killing or assassination' cannot be derived from the literal senses of 'wet' (moist) and 'work' (task); the phrase is specialized criminal/military jargon and relies on a metaphorical association (e.g., 'wet' = blood) that is not transparent to an average B1 learner. Because this sense is register-specific and culturally encoded rather than compositional, learners who know the constituent words would not reliably infer the idiomatic meaning.
Etymology
Wet work may come from a Russian spy phrase and one popular story says it called murder a 'wet affair' because a killed person was often wet with blood. That's why wet work now means secret operations 'to kill people'.