The term "Cleaning Lemma" refers to a family of similar propositions that have been used in Quantum Coding Theory to estimate the minimum distance of a code in terms of its length and dimension. We show that the mathematical core is a simple fact of linear algebra of inner product spaces; moreover, it admits a further reduction to a combinatorial, lattice-theoretical level. Several concrete variants of the Cleaning Lemma and some additional propositions are derived as corollaries of the proposed approach.