Forgive and Forget

水に流す (mizu ni nagasu): forgive and forget; literally, set it adrift on the water. 流す is to let the current carry a thing off, and what is carried off is a grudge, a quarrel, the knot left in the heart: the Japanese says send it down the river where English says forget. The river is the purification's river. At the rite of 祓 a paper figure is rubbed on the body to take the year's defilements and is set adrift on a stream, and the idiom's water is that water. The phrase itself is Meiji. Its first recorded use is a taunt in an 1874 kabuki play about the Soga brothers' vendetta, said to the two men in Japanese story who never let a grudge go; the English equation, forgive and forget, was made in a 1909 dictionary and has held.