This term is relatively recent, originating in Chicago during Prohibition when wives of bootleggers used the laundry they hung from their third-story clotheslines as secret signals. According to the code, one sheet meant they had run out of grain alcohol, two sheets meant the bathtub was full of gin and they had run out of bottles to put it in, and three sheets meant someone had fallen into the tub.
Legend has it that the practice was abandoned after one housewife, who happened to live next door to the family of Elliot Ness, in her flustered state of mind got the lines mixed up and pinned her three sheets to the line of her neighbor.
When a clean up goon arrived at the door carrying a large empty valise and pushed his way past her, heading toward the bathroom, Mrs. Ness assumed he was an overzealous Fuller Brush man anxious to demonstrate his wares.
Whatever he expected to find in the tub, it was certainly not the formidable aspect of the treasury agent's mother-in-law wielding a razor like an inexperienced Rabbi on the eighth day.
His hasty exit was attended by a trail of toilet paper stuck to his shoe. Which greatly facilitated his being tracked to a local speakeasy, where he was already on this third boilermaker. The subsequent raid and arrests yielded several convictions and history tells that the goon in question spent the rest of his days folding linen in the prison laundry.
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