bottle-washer
Definition
- Noun:
- Literal meaning: A person whose job is to wash bottles, especially in a brewery or laboratory.
- Figurative meaning (informal): A person who does a wide variety of menial or subordinate tasks; a general assistant or factotum.
Usage Examples
- Literal:
- The brewery hired a new bottle-washer to clean the returned glass containers. (A worker assigned to wash bottles.)
- Figurative:
- In a small startup, everyone is a bottle-washer, doing whatever needs to be done. (Everyone performs various low-level tasks.)
- She started as the office bottle-washer, but now she runs the company. (She began as a general helper.)
Advanced Usage
- The term is often used humorously or self-deprecatingly to describe a person who handles all the tedious or unglamorous work in an organization.
- I'm not just the manager; I'm also the bottle-washer when things get busy. (I do all the small, necessary jobs.)
Variants and Related Words
- Bottle-washing (n): the act or process of cleaning bottles.
- The bottle-washing machine broke down, delaying production. (The machine used for cleaning bottles.)
Synonyms
- Factotum: a person employed to do all kinds of work.
- Jack-of-all-trades: a person who can do many different types of work (though this may imply skill, while "bottle-washer" implies low status).
- Menial: a person who does humble, low-level tasks.
- Gopher: (informal) a person who runs errands and does small jobs.
Related Idioms
- Chief cook and bottle-washer: an idiom used to describe someone who does all the work, especially in a small business or household.
- As the only employee, he was the chief cook and bottle-washer. (He did everything from cooking to cleaning.)
Phrasal Verbs
- (None directly associated with "bottle-washer"; the word is a compound noun, not a verb.)