In #FantasticFour c1967: "toss in the sponge". Throwing in the "towel" is instead much much more frequent in #American #English literature today, but these were pretty evenly used up until about the 1970s (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=throw+in+the+towel%2Cthrow+in+the+sponge&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-US-2019&smoothing=3). As a huge #boxing fan who has watched very many fights between the 1920s and 1970s, this is surprising as I can't recall ever hearing a reference to a sponge.

#linguistics #languagevariation #languagechange #lexicology #Marvel #comics #Fantastic4 #sports