to keep one's nose clean
11
6.8
- idiom
- Informal
:
no meterse en problemas
- If you want to stay out of trouble, just keep your nose clean and follow the rules.
- try to keep your nose clean
- want to keep your nose clean
- just keep your nose clean
Examples
-
"Keep your nose clean, buddy, you hear me?" says Dean.
Blog text (20) -
Just remember what I said: Keep your nose clean till the court date.
-
I do my job... and I keep my nose clean.
-
According to the computer, he kept his nose clean.
-
Two weeks to keep my nose clean, okay?
-
Like they say, he paid his taxes, did his work, kept his nose clean.
Fiction book (2001) -
Just keep your nose clean, do your work, and keep cheerful.
Fiction book (1992) -
You must keep your nose clean, do as you're told, come to work on time, and everything will be all right.
Academic text (1992) -
Keep your nose clean and start rebuilding some of that respect you lost.
Blog text (12) -
So keep your nose clean, be a good earner, follow the rules, and who knows, maybe one day when they open the books, you get straightened out.
Antonyms
How Law-abiding
- Informal
11
6.8
200
2.6
Surface Forms
Morphology
The combination of 'keep' and 'clean' does signal maintaining a blameless state (so there is a partial, compositional cue), but 'nose' is not literally linked to wrongdoing and makes the overall meaning idiomatic. A B1 learner who knows the words might guess a sense of keeping something unspoiled, but would likely not reliably infer the specific meaning 'avoid trouble' without prior exposure.
Etymology
Keep one's nose clean may come from a simple image: in old street fights a cut or bloody nose showed you had been in trouble, so to keep your nose clean meant staying out of fights and danger. So today keep one's nose clean means 'to avoid trouble'.