sweep (something) under the rug

To ignore, deny, or conceal from public view or knowledge something that is embarrassing, unappealing, or damaging to one's reputation. The senator has been accused of trying to sweep his former drug use under the rug. You need to stop sweeping your problems under the rug. Nothing will get resolved like that!

sweep under the rug

Hide something, as in Their attempts to sweep the scandal under the rug were not very successful. This idiom alludes to sweeping dust under the rug, so it won't be seen. [Mid-1900s]

sweep under the rug

To avoid discussing or dealing with (something negative or troubling).

sweep (something) under the rug, to

To conceal something. This allusion to hiding household dust or debris by sweeping it under a rug or carpet was used figuratively only from the mid-twentieth century. It appeared in the Boston Globe in 1979: “Attempts to sweep the Chappaquiddick scandal under the rug have not succeeded.”

See also: sweep, to

See also:

References in periodicals archive

Interestingly, a central thread to those principles is a performance review, both of the board as a whole and that of individual directors--the latter a flaw that too many boards have long been willing to sweep under the rug.

Building Better Boards: A Blueprint for Effective Governance

It's just something that you can't sweep under the rug.

"All the requirements of marriage": a Long Island man continues his fight to have his Vermont civil union recognized in New York two years after his partner died in a hospital

"This is more evidence that the energy crisis was not a California-created problem, but rather market manipulation by the energy pirates that FERC was ready to sweep under the rug." The agreement calls for El Paso to give California consumers $1 billion in discounts on natural gas and power purchases over the next 20 years.

FERC considers whether to bless El Paso-California agreement. (Washington Watch)

From the perspective of events, J'accuse marked Zola's emergence as a key participant, but as a piece of political journalism, it is neither as compelling nor as incisive as the letters written in 1899-1900 to protest an amnesty bill intended to sweep under the rug what remained of the affair.

The Dreyfus Affair: 'J'accuse' and Other Writings

A Few Good Men suffers similarly from a subtext the playwright, Aaron Sorkin, has tried to sweep under the rug. It is, even so, a pretty good play, and it has been given a production that maximizes all its virtues, with Tom Hulce (who played Mozart in the movie of Amadeus) as a teddy bear of a defense attorney in a military court-martial and Stephen Lang as a psychotically gung-ho Marine Corps Lieutenant colonel, whom the audience recognizes, from his first sharkish smile, as the real villain, for whom the defendants, two enlisted men blindly obeying orders, are taking the rap.

A Few Good Men

She is right, of course; we should not air our dirty linen in public and just sweep under the rug everything wrong that this administration does.

Negative media reports re PH simply not true

I would never condone, sweep under the rug or refuse to take any step to ensure we did not eradicate any behavior of this kind," Madigan wrote in a letter to Democratic caucus members on Friday.

Madigan: I'll do better with harassment claims