Cuz laundry hampers your day of having fun. 
Now I KNOW why it's called a clothes hamper...
- Thread starter timetofly
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Quiet in here, innit? I'll crawl out from under me rock.
I know this one. It's a lost link to a pre-SI measurement system to quantify how soiled clothes were. To set the reference scale, bacon would be rubbed on fabric which would then be sucked by someone with a calibrated face. This could then be compared to the taste of bacon from the sample under test, giving a value in ham per square inch per second. Over time this was abbreviated to "ham-per". With the decline in people willing to have their faces calibrated because they really couldn't be bothered, the meaning changed to a shorthand for the receptacle where the clothes would be placed, and the formerly noble profession of the smocksucker passed into obscurity. Or something like that.
Besides, if it had been called a "clothes hamster" that would have sounded silly.
I know this one. It's a lost link to a pre-SI measurement system to quantify how soiled clothes were. To set the reference scale, bacon would be rubbed on fabric which would then be sucked by someone with a calibrated face. This could then be compared to the taste of bacon from the sample under test, giving a value in ham per square inch per second. Over time this was abbreviated to "ham-per". With the decline in people willing to have their faces calibrated because they really couldn't be bothered, the meaning changed to a shorthand for the receptacle where the clothes would be placed, and the formerly noble profession of the smocksucker passed into obscurity. Or something like that.
Besides, if it had been called a "clothes hamster" that would have sounded silly.
