About Codes and Languages and more like signs and signals …
Zeichen und Zeichensprache
Zeichen und Verkehr
Nicht das Verb zeichnen … oder unterzeichnen …
Hemingway
Everything about him was old except his eyes.
They were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated.
Aussie Slang with Kel
OZWORD OF THE DAY: “Grub” (Author is Kel)
I’ve been asked why food is called ‘grub.’ This is certainly common, and I’m sure all of us have referred to food as ‘grub’ at one time or another. But the story behind the word is anything but simple.
It turns out that ‘grub’ entered the English language around 1400 as a verb meaning ‘to dig.’ Behind it is a common Germanic word with exactly that meaning. In the days of Old English, it would have been written as grybban.
The word ‘grave’ comes from that same source, and for the same reason—it involves digging. I seem to remember my later father-in-law, a farmer, talking about ‘grubbing up weeds’ from the paddock—so that the verb ‘to grub’ (‘to dig’) still exists.
By the way, when we call witchety grubs ‘grubs’ we are using the same word—since they are found on, or under, the ground.
And it has formed some compound nouns— ‘grub stake’ is an American expression for the amount of money a prospector will need to go out into the wilderness looking for gold (or whatever). And that compound means ‘food money’. The ‘stake’ part comes from gambling—it means an amount you put at risk. And if you supply ‘food money’ to a prospector (the deal being you share in what he finds) and he then finds nothing, you’ve lost your ‘stake.’
There was also ‘grub street’ which the great Samuel Johnson in his 1755 dictionary says, was the name of a street near Moorfields in London (now called Milton Street), ‘much inhabited (says Johnson) by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.’ It was inhabited, in other words, by hack writers who churned out their stuff to keep food on the table.
(This sort of writing was later called writing ‘potboilers’—hack work designed to keep the pot on the stove boiling, and the writer fed.)
But why was ‘grub’ (a word for digging) ever applied to food?
One suggestion is that—as anyone with a vegetable garden will tell you—a lot of our food is actually dug out of the ground. And that may be the source.
Although I quite like the alternative suggestion—that when we eat, we ‘dig in’ to our plate of food. We’ve all been told, at some point in your lives, to ‘come on, dig in, before dinner gets cold.’
There was even a rhyming version: two, four, six, eight, dig in, don’t wait!
Tonight I will join Peta Credlin on Sky News for “Words Matter.”
contact Kel at ozwords.com.au
And subcribe yourself, if you wish.
Kindly from the Gold Coast
Peter H Bloecker (Retired Educator and Director of Studies)
ARD App und Lernen heute, ein Beispiel:
4 Seiten einer Nachricht
More about Signals and Codes and Zeichensprache here …
Was sind Axiome?
Reading exactly what?
There is good taste and bad taste: What about really good Literature & writing in Style?
The old man was thin and gaunt with deep wrinkles in the back of his neck.
Why is this good writing style?
Blue and truly blue from OZ.
What is blue?
What is true blue?
Motto for the day:
The Ocean is always right, said one of the White Horses.
This is only the Beginning!
#good
#different
#Hemingway
#education
#linguistics
You must be logged in to post a comment.