to throw the baby out with the bathwater
4
8.1
- idiom
- Informal
:
tirar lo valioso con lo desechable
- Of course, be careful you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
And so in doing that, it certainly appears to me that they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
- And so in doing that, it certainly appears to me that they threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Examples
-
No one will benefit from throwing the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to curricular reform.
Academic text (2013) -
Now let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Blog text (16) -
And certainly, it is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Blog text (10) -
But then, most people throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Blog text (34) -
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here.
Blog text (27) -
At the same time, I want to issue that reminder not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Blog text (9) -
In education, there is a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater in the pursuit of the next big thing.
Academic text (2015) -
Simply put, we didn't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Academic text (2015) -
But a lot can happen in a year... don't throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet.
Blog text (18) -
We should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when revising our policy, as some aspects are still valuable.
Synonyms
1
6.0
To reject or get rid of something no longer needed
1
9.1
To give up something important in a careless or disrespectful way
To throw something away and stop using it
Antonyms
How Careless
Surface Forms
Morphology
throw + the + baby + out + with + the + bathwater
The idiomatic sense of unintentionally discarding something valuable cannot be predicted from the literal meanings of 'throw', 'baby', 'out', 'with', and 'bathwater'; a B1 learner who knows the words would likely take it literally and not infer the abstract cautionary meaning. Although some languages have analogous idioms, the mapping is conventional and culturally specific, so the expression functions as an opaque idiom for most learners.
Etymology
The idiom throw the baby out with the bathwater comes from a clear image: when people emptied dirty bathwater, they might accidentally throw the small baby away with it. So today the phrase means 'to get rid of something valuable while trying to remove something bad'.