Why do we say "Don't Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater"?

Meaning:

When something doesn’t meet expectations, don’t discard the whole; keep the parts that are good while jettisoning those that are bad.

Background:

In April 1999, an email began circulating with the subject line, “Life in the 1500s.” It listed many practices/features of the time period that the author claimed became common idioms (e.g., animals falling from slick thatched roofs during storms generated the phrase, “It’s raining cats and dogs”). The email included this paragraph:

[T]hey took their yearly bath in May, but it was just a big tub that they would fill with hot water. The man of the house would get the privilege of the nice clean water. Then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children. Last of all the babies. By then the water was pretty thick. Thus, the saying, "don't throw the baby out with the bath water." It was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it.

This, like the rest of the email, was debunked soon after.

The phrase, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” did in fact originate in the 16th century, but it’s German in origin. It was first coined by theologian Thomas Murer (1475-1537) in his satirical work, Narrenbeschwörung (“Appeal to Fools”), published in 1512. He even included a woodcut to illustrate the process. It was in common usage in Germany for centuries, employed by authors such as Martin Luther King and Goethe.

The saying made it into the English language in the mid-1800s, first used by Scottish philosopher and German scholar Thomas Carlyle in an essay denouncing slavery (written in 1849 and published in 1853). In his analogy, slavery is the bathwater, to be thrown out, without harming the enslaved (the baby).

By the 1900s the idiom had found its way into the French language, and “jeter le bébé avec l’eau du bain” became common in print. Linguists surmise it was adopted from the English version rather than the German because of the word “bébé,” as the translation of the German word for baby – “kind” – would more likely have been “enfant.”

While perhaps not as widely used today, it’s still quite commonly used, with its meaning clearly understood by most.

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