Wet Blanket

A real firefighting technique long before modern extinguishers existed. A wet blanket, being heavy, flexible, and damp, could be thrown over flames to smother them, cooling the burning material and cutting off its air supply. The earliest known mention of the term appears as far back as 1618, in published instructions for sailors on an expedition led by Sir Walter Raleigh to South America. The figurative sense, describing a person who dampens other people's enthusiasm, developed by the late 18th century; one 1775 magazine piece calls certain dull people "wet blankets to the imagination," and English author George Keate used the phrase in an 1779 travel book to describe relatives who smothered a budding romance.