In a message dated 12/18/00 11:33:03 AM Central Standard Time,
[log in to unmask] writes:

<< Clean is way to vague a term. My mother and I certainly have our
 disagreements on what is clean and what isn't. >>

To the point of distinctions of clean, my grandmother was a clean freak. All
of the upholstered furniture in her house was covered with layers of
newspaper and plastic. The carpets, from front to back with plastic runners.
Heaven save anyone that did not take their shoes off on entering the house.
Her house was the last place that I remember seeing a clean refrigerator,
except in movies.

My lesson in clean was in the basement apartment where I was assigned w/ Spic
n' Span to clean smudges and shoe marks from the inside face of the white
exit door. I was not the type of kid that shirked work, I often volunteered
to help. Every time I told her that I was finished she would point out one
more speck of whatever and I would go back to the cleaning. I'm quite
familiar w/ the effect of Spin n' Span, rags, and lukewarm water on enamel
paint and knuckles. I spent close to six hours working on the one door. It
was not such a bad day, and set the mood for lessons later in life. She was
also compulsive about mowing the lawn, every pass had to overlap an exact
number of inches, follow the same contours and path each time, and the mower
had to be pushed in the same direction, otherwise the grass would not lay
correctly. They lived on the side of a hill and had plenty of planting trees.
Exactness was a task. I don't think she meant any of it as a punishment, she
really did see the door as dirty, and the lawn as disturbed... and I was
willing to keep working until my efforts met with her perception.

Subsequently I consider that I may be overly sensitive to homeowners saying
that they want the face of their building cleaned. Either I overanticipate
their request, or I am inwardly afraid to engage in the relationship. I move
cautiously around any discussion of cleanliness. More than that, I have a
phobia regarding requests for the removal of bituminous tar from brick.

As to dividing up *clean* into levels of definition... I think there is a
problem w/ the social/spiritual politics of cleanliness that will make
arriving at such distinctions in our language difficult. I don't think that
the people, like my grandmother, who want things to be clean really want
there to be a clear line in common use -- it gives them power when the line
of definition is invisible and at their discretion. Once someone has agreed
to achieve clean, an agreement to meet another individual's ambiguous concept
of clean, then the worker has given power over to the one demanding the
service. Then there are the cases where someone wants to stop cleaning, like
the coal company that wants to say the sludge is now cleaned up from the
creek bed. Truth is we don't treat each other all so well and the words, I
feel, often are found limited to definitions that reinforce our
relationships. I think it a tacit agreement of our culture to not be too
specific about the meaning of the word.

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