grist

You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘to add grist to the mill’, meaning to use something to your advantage e.g. ‘his utter stupidity really added grist to the mill’. But what exactly is grist? And why are you adding it to your mill? Well, it turns out that it’s a pretty literal metaphor – grist is simply grain that’s ground into flour and a mill is, well, you know what a mill is.

A mill, obviously

The earliest known use of the phrase in the metaphorical sense is in a work by an English theologian and reformer called John Foxe, who wrote in 1570: ‘All these are as grist to the mill to the papists.’ You might be able to guess from this that Foxe was a protestant, having converted from Catholicism. If I were a cynic, I might think that some of the reason for this was because he was due to take Catholic holy orders after his academic career ended, which of course meant giving up all action in the trouser department. He went on to have six kids, so it was lucky for them he did convert. Although Wikipedia describes him as ‘so bookish that he ruined his health by his persistent study’, so I’m very impressed he found the time. He also wrote an enormous (1,800 pages no less) history of Christian martyrs and their persecution and suffering, which became a popular and influential work during the Protestant Reformation, so maybe it wasn’t all about the winkie.

Anyway, back to ‘grist’. It comes from the Old English word, ahem, ‘grīst’, which also means ‘ground grain’. Not much of an etymological leap there then. That comes from the Old High German word ‘grist’ (again), the Middle Low German word ‘grêst’ (we’re mixing it up now) and the Old Norse word ‘grysta’ (woop woop), all of which mean, you’ve guessed it, ‘ground grain’. ‘Grist’ is also where we get ‘grind’ from. (Are you still awake?)

We’ve been using the word ‘grist’ in English since at least the 9th century to refer to both the grain brought to a mill for grinding, and the ground flour itself (which seems confusing to me, so lucky I’m not a miller).

cathedral

I live in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, which is a cathedral town. Not a city – contrary to what a lot of people think, a town doesn’t immediately become a city just because it has a big ole church in it. In fact, Suffolk doesn’t have any cities in it at all. It’s not alone in this – there are actually nine others which are also city free. Want to have a guess at which ones? Answers at the bottom of the post…

Bury St Edmunds Cathedral (photo by DAVID ILIFF. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0)

Anyway, I digress. A cathedral is called a cathedral because it contains a cathedra, which is basically a nice chair (or throne) for a bishop. Originally the Latin word cathedra didn’t have any religious connotations though – it literally just meant ‘armchair’, and was a term usually reserved for a chair specifically for ladies. I’m not sure what makes a chair female – maybe it gets paid significantly less than the men’s chairs?

The origins of ‘cathedra’ go way back to ‘kmt’ (you can tell that’s an old word because it doesn’t have any vowels in it), a Proto-Indo-European word meaning ‘down’ or ‘with’. It’s thought that the Proto-Indo-European language, or PIE, was spoken from 4500 BC to 2500 BC (I told you it was old). This went into Greek as ‘kata’, meaning ‘down’, and soon fused with ‘hedra’, which comes from another PIE root ‘sed’, ‘to sit’. This created ‘kathedra’ for ‘seat or bench’. When words went from Greek to Latin, the ‘k’s often changed to ‘c’s (which is something to do with how they’re pronounced I think) – hence, ‘cathedra’. And with the Catholic church’s penchant for Latin, it wasn’t long before it made it into their lexicon (losing its femininity along the way, of course).

Time for Bury St Edmunds facts. Did you know…

1. The single largest witch trial in England was held in BSE in 1645. It led to 18 women being executed by famous witchfinder general Vincent Price, sorry Matthew Hopkins, sorry utter sexist bastard. The site of the trial is now a Premier Inn hotel, and the places where the witches were executed are now a garden centre and a golf club.

2. Bury St Eds featured prominently in Armando Iannucci’s film The Personal History of David Copperfield. Dickens himself stayed in The Angel Hotel in town three times during his life. You can even sleep in the same four-poster bed as he did in room 215 (although presumably they’ve changed the sheets since then).

3. Measuring just 15ft by 7ft, The Nutshell pub is officially the smalled pub in Britain. Opened in 1867, it has a mummified cat hanging over the bar which was discovered behind the walls during renovations. Mummified cats were often placed in the walls of newly built homes to ward off unwanted spirits back in the day. There are also several mummified cats in our local museum – I’m not sure why we love them so much here.

Some mummified cats (and mice). Sorry

So, did you guess the other city-less counties? They are: Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Dorset, the Isle of Wight, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Rutland (also Britain’s smallest county), Surrey and Warwickshire. Buckinghamshire was on the list until quite recently, but the Queen made Milton Keynes a city at part of the Platinum Jubilee Civic Honours, whatever they are.

hocus-pocus

Hocus-pocus is a noun used to describe magic or sleight of hand, often in a derogatory sense (as in ‘the saleperson did some kind of hocus-pocus and now I own a cow’). But did you know that actually, using it might get you struck by lightning/sent straight to hell (if you believe in that type of thing, of course)? That’s because some people believe it’s a corruption (or a perversion if you’re feeling particulary angry) of the phrase ‘Hoc est enim corpus meum’ or ‘This is my body’ which is used in Catholic masses for the Eucharist. GASP. This connection was first made in 1694 (which shows how old the word is) by John Tillotson, who was only the bloody Archbishop of Canterbury. He said this is one of his sermons:

“In all probability those common juggling words of hocus pocus are nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus, by way of ridiculous imitation of the priests of the Church of Rome in their trick of Transubstantiation.”

Despite this, there isn’t any real evidence to prove that 17th-century conjurers were actively trying to commit blasphemy or sentence themselves to eternal damnation. It’s more likely that hocus-pocus is just a couple of rhyming nonsense words put together that magicians incorporated into their patter to help them misdirect their audiences.

There’s also a theory that we get the word ‘hoax’ from the ‘hocus’ of ‘hocus pocus’, which was itself used on its own to mean ‘to play a trick on, to trick (someone)’ or, randomly, ‘to stupefy (someone) with drugged liquor ( … to steal from them)’ (from Wiktionary).