This one is for Brian over at An Audience of One. He asked what the phrase “Throwing the baby out with the bath water” meant. This was also not in the book, (lol) and not surprising! It seems that none of the questions so far have been there! Oh well, maybe the next one. 
According to the only page I could find that actually explained this by Wolfgang Mieder:
“(DON’T) THROW THE BABY OUT WITH THE BATHWATER”:
The Americanization of a German Proverb and Proverbial Expression*In memoriam Wayland D. Hand
When the proverb “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water” or its parallel proverbial expression “To throw the baby out with the bath water” appear today in Anglo-American oral communication or in books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements or cartoons, hardly anybody would surmise that this common metaphorical phrase is actually of German origin and of relatively recent use in the English language. It had its first written occurrence in Thomas Murner’s (1475-1537) versified satirical book Narrenbeschwörung (1512) which contains as its eighty-first short chapter entitled “Das kindt mit dem bad vß schitten” (To throw the baby out with the bath water) a treatise on fools who by trying to rid themselves of a bad thing succeed in destroying whatever good there was as well. In seventy-six rhymed lines the proverbial phrase is repeated three times as a folkloric leitmotif, and there is also the first illustration of the expression as a woodcut depicting quite literally a woman who is pouring her baby out with the bath water.1 Murner also cites the phrase repeatedly in later works and this rather frequent use might be an indication that the proverbial expression was already in oral currency towards the end of the fifteenth century in Germany.
All in all it means throwing out the good with the bad or reject the good with the bad. You can read the rest of his essay here.
