unplumbered en · ADJ
Etymology
From un- + plumbered.
Meanings
-
(informal, not-comparable, rare) Not plumbered.
Situations are routine, but the unplumbered and therefore overflooded bathroom and the finger jammed into the firehose nozzle provide laughter because of treatment by veterans of the comedy field.
1932 September 17, “Union Wages”, in Martin Quigley, editor, Motion Picture Herald, volume 108, number 12, New York, N.Y.: Quigley Publishing Co., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 40, column 3:Mr. Stuart Chase has touched upon the problem in his sug: gestive book Men and Machines. But the difficulty does not lie chiefly with mechanical appliances: it lies rather with the mechanical spirit, the spirit of standardisation, and that seems inseparable from a normal, harmonious, classical static, or Utopian world. We might smash all the machines, as they did in Erewhon, and spiritually find ourselves none the richer. Arcadian simplicity may be as tedious and stifling as the zippy atmosphere of Zenith; indeed, Sheila Kaye-Smith has found unplumbed stupidity in unplumbered villages.
1930 August, Albert Guérard, “Graphopolis—a Utopia for Literature”, in The Nineteenth Century and After, volume CVIII, number DCXLII, London: Constable & Company […], →OCLC, page 256:Her picture of the corruption of politics (for young ladies at that time encountered most formidable rivals in the professional politicians who made the gratuitous task of serving on district school boards the stepping-stone to higher things), her description of the homes on which the light of a woman school director’s countenance had never fallen, her hushed fears that the school buildings were hotbeds of wasted school supplies and unplumbered pestilence, fairly stirred the fatherly man.
1904 January, L. R. Elder, “Miss Dodd on the School Board”, in The Century Magazine, volume LXVII, number 3, New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., →ISSN, →OCLC, page 341, column 2:[P]ublic toilets that . . . surely merit an Oscar of a kind for sheer inadequacy and unplumbered primitiveness.
1985 May 17, Richard Foley, “Medjugorje Revisited”, in Catholic Herald, London, →ISSN, →OCLC; quoted in Kevin Devlin, “The Virgin of Medjugorje”, in Radio Free Europe Research, volume 10, Washington, D.C.: Radio Free Europe, 1985, →OCLC:Any way you take it, the Saturday night bath in an un-plumbered farm house is no joke and after it’s over you have a special feeling of having accomplished something.
R. J. McGinnis, the staff of The Farm Quarterly, compilers (1960), “The Bath”, in The Good Old Days: An Invitation to Memory, Cincinnati, Oh.: J. & W. Publishing Co., →LCCN, →OCLC, page 92