Meaning of wish-wash | Babel Free

Definitions

1. Any weak, thin drink.
   archaic, countable, uncountable
2. Talk, music, or art, or ideas that lack any value, substance, originality, or meaning; dreck.
   countable, uncountable
3. The sound of liquid sloshing
   countable, uncountable

Examples

“Between the result of the above, and the ordinary wish-wash served as coffee, the difference is too great to be expressed.”

“The famous bohemian cafés, the Dôme, the Coupole and the Rotonde, still remained; the hooded iron stove still warmed the regulars settled beside the round tables from the wintry streets; the waiter, with the unvarying rudeness of Paris, served the "national coffee," that grayish-brown wish-wash which passed for coffee in Paris and which, like everything labeled "national," roused the suspicion that it wasn't what it was called but only resembled the real thing.”

“They got 250 grams of bread and wish-wash for breakfast; in the evening, he who had worked got kasha, wish-wash, and bread.”

“It consisted of bread and for the first course "the usual wish-wash” (balanda), “so-called soup in which several pieces of congealed cabbage floated.””

“It is a thing that fails altogether to interest; a wish-wash that only serves to pass the time.”

“They confined their sermons on Sunday to the decorous wish-wash in which average men treated in a harmless way subjects to which the people were indifferent.”

“it is a clearing away of the wish-wash which assumes that lack of national distinction is an international virtue.”

“What I am doing is asking the senator to explain why Labor has come up with such wish-wash on this matter.”

“But then all of that seems to be a bunch of wish-wash—nothing more than lip service.”

“This simile is accurate only if the object of analysis is considered in a void, but in the context of "an old Germanic culture" the performance loses its value and becomes only a "wish-wash."”

“And Ralph Vaughan Williams 'is now a solitary figure, for his influence has served to produce a steady trickle of pentatonic wish-wash.”

“Martha steadily turned and turned, and the cream within the snowy white sycamore box went 'wish-wash, wish-wash, wish-wash, playing, after all, a very delicious tune in the young farmer's ears, for it suggested yellow butter, and yellow butter suggested sovereigns, and sovereigns suggested home comforts and saving, and above all, the turning of that handle suggested the winning of just the very wife to occupy that home.”

“Then in the morning the washing of the deck; rush comes an engine pipe on the floor–ceases, is renewed, flourishes about, rushes again; then suddenly half a dozen brooms, wish-wash, wish-wash, scrib-scrub, scratching and roaring alternately.”

“As they lay there, dazedly reliving the adventure that had brought them to this place, they heard the sound of the wish-wash-wish of lapping water.”

“Yet at these moments, that sound was not a single sound. There was another beat in the warmth of the wish-wash.”

CEFR level