The journey to the nuthouse might offer some interesting discourse. I'll thrown in my ballcap.

A hamper would definitely be a benefit though. - Ouch, next please.

How can it be a benefit when it's called a hamper?

It holds your dirty clothes while they wait for laundry day.

Aaaah, this seems to be a BE/AE issue

A hamper in BE is a basket of food either for a picnic or given as a present.

I guess it goes back a few hundred years when Britain sent all their empty hampers to the colonies. We got them and having no food to put in them, we used them for dirty clothes, and well, you know the rest of that story...

Yes, I still call it a laundry basket, not a laundry hamper. Hampers are supposed to be full of nice things.

My point exactly. An had you sent nice things to the colonies in those hampers 200 some-odd years ago we might not be having this linguistic fol de rol. ;)

So we can't "blame Canada"? (Griff's posting about his day on the cellar sent me off on that tangent).

I think we can and should blame Canada as often as possible. It was probably them that stole the food from the hampers in the first place, then tried blaming the Brits. Bloody mixers!

BTW, do you call what we call a cooler a hamper?

Hampers have lids, laundry baskets do not.

"A superior paper will show how a set of events shaped the person and reveal the order of their life within and against the organization of their world."

Nice! I've got some good stuff for you, MTP. I've been mulling over these very things lately.

Not me! Gravdigr! I had to work so I could only post one flame...

And hampers are for storage, baskets for transport.

A laundry basket has an open top, and holds clean clothes waiting to be folded and put away.

A hamper has a closed top and is full of nasty, dirty clothes.

(remember, at the end of Young Frankenstein, how Elizabeth tells The Monster that she got him a special hamper for his poo-poo undies?)