Word of the week: Hotwashing

You, but better. Much, much better.

Words, as we know, change their meanings over time. Silly once meant “happy.” Nice once meant “foolish.” More recently, we’ve seen the transformation of sick and dope from pejorative to complimentary. See also: fuck with, rawdog.

Sometimes it’s a specialized term, a bit of argot, that undergoes this shift. That’s what’s happening with hotwashing, which has evolved from military jargon to business lingo to general-population slang. Same word, different meaning with each transition.

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I first encountered hotwashing very recently, in Erin Griffith’s June 7 newsletter, “Hotwash the Blip.” That phrase was opaque to me until I saw the photos and read the explanation. Here’s the deal: Netflix is making a limited series, The Altruists, about crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried and his erstwhile girlfriend Caroline Ellison. These real people look like this:

Hot or not? Real life: Caroline Ellison and Sam Bankman-Fried. Via Erin Griffith.

Whereas the actors who’ve been cast to play them look like this:

Hotwashed life: Caroline (Julia Garner) and Sam (Anthony Boyle). Via Hollywood Reporter.

Erin’s observation:

Sure, everyone gets a glow-up when they’re portrayed in a scripted series because actors are a different, more beautiful species than us ugly-ass normies, but this one was apparently too generous for crypto criminals and the Internet did not like it! One commenter accused Netflix of “hotwashing” the couple, which, lol.

That commenter may be “Isabelle.” Btw, my link does not imply an endorsement of the rest of her feed.

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As attentive readers know, I am very much here for new -washing compounds, by which I do not mean sudsy flakes that brighten my whites; I mean words created with the libfix (“liberated affix”) -washed. (See my posts on sanewashing, smallwashing, and sportswashing, and the various links therein.) How recent was hotwashing, I wondered, and where did it come from?

Urban Dictionary, it turns out, nailed it back in January 2019:

Hotwashing is a casting practice in the film industry of the United States in which hot actors are cast in historically non-hot character roles or in roles which are scripted for non-hot characters. The film industry has a history of frequently casting hot actors for roles about non-hot characters.

Tom Holland is playing the “four-eyed geek” Peter Parker (Spiderman) at Forest Hills High School? That’s totally hotwashing!

So hotwashing is the looks equivalent of whitewashing and greenwashing, in which “washing” means “covering up” — in this case, covering up a sub-hot appearance with hotness.¹

But directly beneath the 2019 UD entry is another one, for the noun hotwash. It was submitted in May 2003:

A debriefing, usually following an unexpected incident or crisis, which includes the events, causes, and “lessons learned”; a post mortem.

After the main email server crashed, disrupting service across the enterprise, there was a hotwash involving the entire IT department.

This is the “business lingo” sense of hotwashing; according to a Wikipedia entry, it’s “a term picked up in recent years by the Emergency Preparedness Community, likely as a result of Homeland Security and other government agencies’ involvement in disaster planning.”

Picked up . . . but from where?

From, uh, warfighters. Wikipedia provides this citation from a U.S. Department of Defense publication (no date provided; looks to be sometime in 2012):

The term Hot Wash comes from the practice used by some soldiers of dousing their weapons in extremely hot water as a means of removing grit and residue after firing. While this practice by no means eliminates the need to properly break down the weapon later for cleaning, it removes the major debris and ensures the cleaning process goes more smoothly. One infantry soldier described it as “the quick and dirty cleaning that can save a lot of time later.”

For the record, the OED doesn’t have any definitions for hot wash or hotwash. (My query produced a counter-query about whether I was looking for hogwash, hotdish, or hot flash.) Merriam-Webster also came up emptyhanded and wanted to know whether I was interested in mouthwash or potash. As a result, I can’t tell you whether hotwash originated in the U.S. armed forces or elsewhere, or when it was first used. I tried the Google Ngram viewer but got a lot of irrelevant results involving fabric-laundering. I did find a reference to “hotwash” = “debriefing” in a 1992 publication of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division Combat team, but if there are earlier citations someone else will have to find them.

Meanwhile, I invite your contributions about personal experiences with hotwashing in any of its senses.

1. “Hot” has meant “sexy, sexually attractive” for a surprisingly long time. Green’s Dictionary of Slang gives a first citation dated 1886; it’s from the U.K., not the U.S.