We could wash our hair of this guy

On Deadline: White House, Nicole Wallace’s guest, Jeremy Peters of The NY Times, was talking about how Fox News executives and reporters deluded themselves by believing that  Trump’s awful behavior on Jan. 6, 2021 meant that they were done with him.  He said that they thought “We could wash our hair of this guy.” This is a nice congruent conflation of “wash (one’s) hands of (someone or something)” and “gonna wash that man right outta my hair”, both meaning to renounce or distance oneself from someone. The latter is a song lyric from the musical “South Pacific”, and is popular enough in the lexicon to qualify as an idiom.

A big thanks to “my ol’ pal”, Beatrice Zablocki, for hearing this one and sending it in.