This verb bugs me.

What is wrong with using the verb “clean” instead of “cleanse”?

Why have two extra letters to refer to the act of, say, cleaning one’s face?

Why must it be “Cleanse your face with Scrub-o!”?

Why cannot it be “Clean your face with Scrub-o!”?

Perhaps some people who use “cleanse” like the “z” sound at the end of the verb.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following verbs (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “clean” — 320,000,000 matches
• “cleanse” — 13,800,000 matches

This tells me that “clean” is 23.2 times as popular as “cleanse” on the Web.