all wet

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

all wet (not comparable)

1. (literally) Thoroughly soaked; drenched.
   • 1805: Journal of Merriwether Clark

     Wind Shifted about to the S. W. and blew hard accompanied with hard rain. rained all the last night we are all wet our bedding and stores are also wet, we haveing nothing which is Sufficient to keep ourselves bedding or Stores dry

   • 1852, Charles Dickens, chapter 59, in Bleak House:

     When I came home, I found a common-looking person, all wet and muddy.

   • 1853: The Illustrated London Magazine

     The persons you meet inside a theatre are all wet, and the actors act as if the rain had taken all the fire out of them, and they had not had time to get a fresh supply.

   • 1972: Trends in long-term care: hearings, ninety-first Congress

     My mother has long hair. They rubbed a towel over it to get the drippings. They combed it out, and it was sopping wet. Then they braided it, and put her to bed with a wet head. The pillow was all wet and her sheet was all wet.

2. (idiomatic) Utterly incorrect; erroneous; uninformed.
   • 1931: U.S. Army Recruiting News

     ...you're all wet, calling me out on that close play at second base!

   • 1935: Liberty vol xii

     The he'll report back to Rita that she's all wet, on account I can't possibly be interested in you when I'm carrying the torch for him, see?

   • 1965, "The Lull That Lapsed," Time, 28 May,

     The lull gave Johnson a chance to show such critics as Canada's Prime Minister Lester Pearson and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright that they were all wet in arguing that a halt in the bombing might open the way to negotiations.

   • 1966: Saint Jane by Robert Hogan

     If you think I withheld the ransom for the glory of France, you're all wet.

3. (idiomatic) Deliberately and grotesquely untruthful.
   • 1940: Of Human Kindness by Ruth Comfort Mitchell

     They've figured out she's a sort of a kind of Joan of Arc. I think she's all wet, and it burns me up to see such a grand person as Ash Banner fall for that stuff!

• Atwell, wallet