Sponge : noun A sponge is a light, porous substance of any material that is used for various purposes because of its property of absorbing liquids and releasing them under pressure.
Sponge something: forget it, don't talk about it anymore (see below).
Throw in the towel: give up the fight; withdraw from a competition (see below).
To have a sponge in the throat: to always be thirsty.
To drink, to be soaked like a sponge: to drink, to have drunk more than reason.
This guy is a real sponge! : he is a drunkard.
Inner sponge: stomach of a thirsty person.
Mistress of a pimp.
- The expression "Skip the sponge": it is to forgive, not to evoke any more committed faults.
Here we are faced with a beautiful household metaphor whose distant origin comes from the seabed.
Indeed, the sponge is first of all an extremely primitive marine animal (without organs). Its capacity to absorb liquids, while being very flexible, has made it an object of intensive fishing for nearly three millennia.
The sponge is generally used to clean something, the blow of sponge making it possible to erase more or less undesirable traces.
And it is from this use that, from the beginning of the XNUMXth century, first in the form wear the sponge, Our metaphor was born where the virtual use of a sponge is a form of forgiveness that allows you to erase or forget many unpleasant past things, mistakes committed or reprehensible acts.
- The expression "Throw in the towel": it is to give up, to give up.
Boxing aficionados know perfectly well where this expression comes from. Indeed, in this sport, the manager of the boxer uses a sponge (in fact now a towel) to, between the rounds, to wipe his foal of the sweat and possibly of the blood which he has on the face and the chest, and to refresh it. And if ever his protégé, during a round, is massacred without asking for mercy, he throws this "sponge" on the ring to signify the abandonment of the fight. This expression has been used in France outside the context of boxing since 1901, in translation from English to throw up the sponge, used metaphorically since 1877.