We’ve all heard it, haven’t we? “Wash your mouth out with soap!” – the time-honoured battle cry of scandalised mothers and exasperated schoolteachers at the merest whiff of profanity. It’s one of those sayings that practically begs to be spoken, an incantation of moral hygiene, if you will. Failing to utter it in the wake of an ill-chosen word feels as unnatural as hearing a sneeze without the obligatory “bless you” or “Gesundheit” – a silence so wrong it prickles at the skin like an unshed shiver. But let’s be honest, have you ever tasted soap? It’s like the Devil’s own recipe for penance – a flavour somewhere between regret and regret’s nastier cousin.
I recall the day that first made me curious enough to put the old saying to the test. The day prior had been an unmitigated disaster, a chapter of woe that might have sprung from the pages of Oliver Twist. A cocky new lad – brash as a rooster and twice as irritating – had made it his singular mission to turn my school day into a comedy of errors, with me as the unwilling jester. By the time I staggered home, I was a walking fresco of filth, daubed from head to toe in good, honest mud. The fields had had their way with me, and I looked as if I’d been dragged backwards through a hedgerow by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
That evening, a steaming bath and fresh pyjamas restored some semblance of dignity, but my hair, alas, was a battleground yet to be conquered. The morning brought the usual reckoning: my mother, armed with a brush and a will of iron, set about my tangled mop with the fervour of a blacksmith at the anvil. I winced and flinched as she yanked at knots and muttered about the sorry state of my curls – though always with the contradictory reassurance that they were still lovely.
It was in the midst of this merciless grooming that she broached the subject of my mud-slicked return the previous afternoon. With a mother’s inescapable precision, she pressed for details. I, still half-crippled from yesterday’s ordeal and now enduring yet another in the form of this hairbrush inquisition, stumbled through a halting explanation, losing my words somewhere between tugs. And then it happened. A slip. A syllable, ugly and unfinished, tumbled from my lips: “Fu—”
Too late.
Quick as a viper, she pushed me back to arm’s length, one hand firm on my shoulder, the other brandishing the brush like a righteous sceptre. Her eyes flashed with the unspoken fury of every mother since Eve. The words were inevitable. “You need your mouth washed out with soap!”
Now, you might think that would have been the end of it. That shame and good sense would have kept me on the straight and narrow. But oh no – curiosity, that old tempter, got the better of me. Perhaps it was the sheer theatricality of the phrase, the idea that soap could somehow scour away impurity like some modern-day baptism for the tongue. Whatever it was, the thought took root, and before long, I found myself staring at a pristine bar of Imperial Leather with a scientist’s resolve.
I took a bite.
It was an abomination. The very taste of sin and sanctimony, as if every scolding ever uttered had been condensed into a single, unholy flavour. I spluttered and spat, gasping for water like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, but nothing could erase the lingering bitterness. I’d hoped for some grand revelation, some cosmic retribution to make sense of the saying, but all I learned was this: soap is decidedly not to my palate.
Looking back, I suppose there’s a lesson in all of this – one about temptation, or impulse, or perhaps just the sheer foolishness of a child’s curiosity. But mostly, it’s a reminder that some idioms are best left untested. After all, as the Good Book says, ‘Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.‘ (Psalm 141:3). And if that fails? Well, best keep the Imperial Leather out of reach.
Wording 