Why does to throw in the towel mean to give up?

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This episode started out to be an episode about the word towel. But I didn’t think there was too much to say about the word towel except for the fact that it lead me to the word sponge.

Here’s how that went.

Towel has meant “towel” for a very long time. It’s a word that appeared in Middle English from Old French but Old French seems to have picked it up from Germanic languages. As such it has sister words in a number of languages all of which have to do with bathing and washing and drying.

As a Middle English word it appeared in 1284 according to The Oxford English Dictionary. The only thing interesting on the page was the expression to throw in the towel.

This is an idiom meaning to “quit” or to “give up trying” and it seems to have appeared first only in 1915.

Why quitting has anything to do with towels is revealed by another expression, being sent to the showers.

In sporting completion it ain’t over ’till it’s over, but when it’s over it’s time to wash up and towel down.

To throw in the towel was an expression from boxing. Between rounds combatants returned to their corners and wiped the sweat from their brows with towels and so throwing in the towel meant that it was time to stop getting beaten up and mop the sweat—and likely blood—from your aching brow.

This expression has survived while another almost identical expression has not.

To toss up, throw up, or chuck up the sponge appeared earlier in 1860 with the same meaning; obviously because before drying your face you’d like to wash it with a sponge.

Hence today’s word is sponge.

We see sponges cut square and made from rubbers and plastics but sponges upon which these manufactured items are modeled were actually animals that live in the sea.

They are sort of like coral in that it is only the leftover structures of their bodies that we normally see.

The ancient Greeks obviously didn’t have the technology to produce expanded foam plastics and so they used these wild sponges to wash with—maybe after boxing.

They gave them a name that (not surprisingly) came to mean “spongy.”

Later the Romans took this “spongy” meaning word and applied it in Latin to other things that had a similar spongy texture; for instance mushrooms. That’s why the words sponge and fungus sound sort of similar.