the.com/wastebasket
A confessional you fill with crumpled drafts, bad ideas, and the evidence of trying.
means A container, usually beside a desk, for collecting paper scraps and small everyday trash before it's properly thrown out.
from A plain English compound that says exactly what it does: "waste" (from Latin vastus, "empty, desolate," by way of Old French) joined to "basket" (a word of murky origin, possibly Celtic, that English has used for woven containers since the Middle Ages). The pairing is fairly modern — the dedicated office receptacle for discarded paper only needed a name once people had enough paper to discard.
- legal term
- Courts call ignored cases the wastebasket of justice
- basketball origin
- Early hoops literally used peach baskets, not unlike trash
- office accident
- Discarded cigarettes made them top fire-starters for decades
- word roots
- Combines waste with basket, a 19th-century coinage
oval office wastebasket — where president nixon's secretary rose mary woods claimed to have accidentally erased 18.5 minutes of watergate tapes in 1973
basquiat wastebasket artwork — jean-michel basquiat created paintings using discarded materials and trash found on new york streets in the 1980s