death to capslock

Author’s note: This essay offers a Watsonian explanation for certain things in the Potterverse. It ignores any Doylist explanations for those things, including Rowling’s.

In reply to my DH sporking, chapter 29, maidofkent wrote in part,

You're right that it seems pretty hypocritical to joke about Snape running away from shampoo, when the male Hogwarts students seem so uninterested in cleanliness. (Perhaps the Slytherins, being under the female influence of water, are namby-pamby types who do bathe regularly and Severus was indeed sorted too soon :))

This got me to thinking about a trio of seemingly unrelated subjects: baths, “mudbloods,” and the Slytherin prejudice against the latter. Many commentators have speculated the reason Salazar Slytherin didn’t like witches and wizards from non-magical backgrounds was because they threatened to expose the world of magical people to their non-magical families and friends. That’s a reasonable explanation, but could his dislike be founded on something more simple? Could it just be a matter of cleanliness?