A native speaker says this statement in the movie "The_Art_of_Racing_in_the_Rain". When the girl is playing with the dog and his grandpa said this to her.
My question is that the adverb "off" here seems strange.
I checked many dictionaries, and it seems that we can only say
Please wipe your feet on the mat.
Please wipe your feet with a cloth.
Please wipe your feet clean.
And we can use "wipe" with "off" if we want to talk about "removing dirt, liquid, etc", for example
Wipe the marks off
Wipe the marks off the wall
I’ll give you this example
Say, there are a couple of paws on a table. And you say “wipe the paws off the table”.
So, if you say “wipe the paws off” people may think that you want to remove the paws off something not “wipe the paws clean” which means to make the paws clean.
If "wipe the table off" meaning "clean the table" is common, then dictionaries should have at least 1 example about it. But I couldn't find any.
So, I think "wipe his paws off" should be "wipe his paws clean" or "wipe dirt off his paws".
Is it wrong to say "Make sure you wipe his paws off before he comes in."?
Note: Look at the Ngram for "wipe the table off". It seems that this kind of usage is quite new, people have been using it since 1940 but not before that.
And probably, it is idiomatic in American English, but not in British English.