Throw the Baby Out with the Bath Water

This is an awesome “cultural” slang phrase here. Imagine you have a little lovely baby and your baby is taking a bath. The bath water will be dirty and you need to throw away the water. Of course it would be crazy to throw away your baby as well. You need to take you baby out of the bath, and only throw away the dirty water. This is very obvious and total common sense, but

that is the what the phrase is literally talking about. In spoken English, if you say, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water“, you are really trying to say, “Just because something is bad, it doesn’t mean that the whole thing is bad. We should save the good part and ONLY get rid of what we don’t want”. For example, you could say, “I know that he has done some bad things in his life. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and hate everything about him. He’s also donated a lot of money to charity and done some wonderful things for this country”. I hope that makes sense and you can add this to your growing vocabulary.