Also, that by leaving clean jeans beside dirty jeans one can make all of them clean enough. This is a corollary to my “laundry compost theory,” by which once a pile of dirty clothes grows large enough it generates a sufficient amount of interior heat to sterilize—thus, to clean—all dirty clothes in the pile.

Indeed. It is a common misconception that when folks in “yon olden days” took their clothes to the river for washing, it was the water they expected to do the cleansing. In fact, this technique arose from a cosmological belief in the “river of time”—dipping the laundry temporarily sped the passage of time, bringing the clothes nearer to clean.

Quite so. And as I assume you already know, the expression “time flies” likewise arose from this fascinating process.

While in our present mistaken age we presume said saw to refer to the variable passage of time while we are engaged in enjoyable activities, this belies the expression’s origins. “Flies” is of course an archaic spelling of “flees,” which would not in itself suggest any variance in the phrase’s intent. However, meticulous research by Herr Doktor Professor Raul Esperanza of Tübingen irrefutably demonstrates that “flees” itself was a chance mispelling of “fleas,” recorded in the diary of one Mathilde Scratchensniff, an early pioneer in the Oklahoma territory.

What the lexigraphically challenged Mrs Scratchensniff in fact meant to record was the remarkable phenomenon by which the duration of rinsing by which a laundry’s completion could be measured. In short, by noting the number of parasitical insects swimming away from the submerged laundry while the launderer counted out forty-five seconds—in other words, by “timing fleas”—the appropriate amount of chronographic manipulation could be employed with reliability.

This is just a fantastic read.

Because I’ll assume that being the historical scholars you are, you would indoubitably know the origin of the phrase ‘time sheet’, I shall not delve deeply into the history of it here.  Suffice to say that with a big enough sheet, the passage of an entire working day could be measured by the elutriation of time from this sheet into water.  Of course, the problem with this and the reason the process evolved into the use of paper, punch clocks and eventually computers was that whilst the sheet was being ‘timed’, the person involved could not achieve a good deal of useful work.  Thus the founder of this process was constantly being asked by their overseer exactly how they were spending their time.  Additionally, if working on several tasks over the course of a day, one had to use a different sheet under the original protocol and this, of course, led to a severe shortage of sheets and consequently consumed a good deal of what would otherwise have been ‘wild time’.  This is obviously what led to certain herbs being cultivated for human use, some to slow the passage of time and others in an attempt to produce more time.  Interestingly, although this obsession with ‘saving time’ helped to induce the industrial revolution, it also produced hippies, stoners and a delicious way of cooking lamb.