The phrase "tilting at windmills" is an interesting one.

It is a reference to Don Quixote attacking windmills because they were giants oppressing the people. Which, today, just seems ridiculous.

However the main reason to switch from hand mills to windmills was that it was far easier for the miller to collect taxes when the grain was milled than for tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there. Not only was it more efficient, but lords who forced their peasants to switch often raised taxes simply because it was easy to do so.

This was all current events when Cervantes wrote Don Quixote. And therefore his audience would have been expected to understand that windmills truly WERE "giants oppressing the people"!

No point. Just fun trivia about how different a modern phrase looks when looked at from the point of view of its history.

I love this.

Similarly, the expression "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" was originally used ironically or mockingly, as it is physically impossible. Some time in the early 20th century it began to be used as an unironic exhortation.

I do love these. I wonder if there is a collection of these sayings that have shifted entirely to mean something else.

Like "blood is thicker than water" was originally "blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb." The meaning is literally the opposite, but it got co-opted and changed at some point.

These things are fascinating.

That seems to be a popular internet myth, but without much evidence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water

Another one I've seen recently circulating on the Internet is an idea that "The customer is always right" was originally "The customer is always right, in matters of taste". Also not true.

That might be even better! Now there's no meaning other than what you, individually, choose to attribute to it.

I love living languages.

I wonder if there's a name for this phenomenon. Eggcorns aren't quite right, as they're more about mishearing a word or phrase in a way that still makes sense in context (e.g. Alzheimer's disease -> old-timers' disease). Mondegreens are about mishearing a word or phrase and substituting them for something different. Those are errors in interpreting phonic elements, but there's no misinterpretation of the words for these phrases/idioms; it's just disregarding the meaning entirely and substituting a new meaning.

A pair of examples: “bought a pig in a poke” and “let the cat out of the bag.” “Poke” is an archaic term for “bag” [0], related to “pocket.”

Apparently a common medieval scam was to try to sell a cat as a suckling pig, concealing the cat in a bag [1]. One who buys such a pig in a poke is cheated. One who lets the cat out of the bag reveals a secret too soon.

Note however that [2] argues that this etymology for lack out of the bag” is not plausible.

[0] Etymology 2, https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/poke

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_in_a_poke

[2] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/let-the-cat-out-of-the-bag..., referenced from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letting_the_cat_out_of_the_b...

Poke means bag in Scotland. You get a poke of chips for example.

"Gangbusters" has become a sort of generic intensifier but the original phrase was something like "to come on like Gangbusters", referring to a radio show with an obnoxiously-noisy intro (it's on Youtube if you're curious). Increasingly distant metaphorical use and people falling out of familiarity with the origin of the phrase led us to modern constructions like "my tomatoes are going gangbusters!" which don't really fit with the original usage.

I am often amused and frustrated at the common institutional excuse of misbehavior being due to "a few bad apples" as though the saying were "a few bad apples are no big deal, get rid of them (or hide them elsewhere in the barrel) if anyone happens to notice them."

I've heard that "a rolling stone gathers no moss" tends to differ in sense between the UK and the US as to whether "moss" is desirable.

The few bad apples saying actually dramatically reversed meaning.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/one-bad-apple-...

Right, that was my point exactly.

On a similar theme I always liked Sir Winston Churchill on taxes:

>We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.

It's a great line, but it's highly misleading. You don't tax Nations, you tax richer individuals (more). So it's like asking a strongman to lift a child.

The child is weak through no fault of it's own, and the strongman is well fed because the child spends all day preparing food for them.

Instead we demand the children to carry oneanother.

Sorry, but this sort of comment (Churchill's) smarts, as in the UK we've just faced a budget that very negatively impacted the poor and gave more to the wealthy. Alexander Boris de Pfeffle Johnson was a noted lover of Churchill, and I can't help feel that this sort of empty rhetoric would have been his (Johnson's) answer to why it was fine to reduce taxation on Champagne at a time of increasing poverty and after his government had spent years increasing the wealth gap.

I don't see why (or in what) it is misleading.

The sentence (which is smart) can be read either as a funny, smart one or taken seriously, if you do the latter, you need to put it in its context, Free-Trade vs. Protectionism in very early 20th century:

https://richardlangworth.com/taxprosperity

BTW the sentence has been paraphrased from the original one.

I have never heard that expression used unironically. I feel like the idea that there are people out there saying it in earnest is itself a meme that was never true.

At least according to a few internet sources, it was in initially invented as a critique with the irony intended.

Over time it became idiomatic speech for initiating something difficult

I believe it's the origin of "bootstrapping" as a verb, in which it immediately becomes unironic technical jargon.

i.e. as in getting a start-up off the ground or, when shortened further, "booting" a computer.

I think you're correct about the origins. That said, a typically ironic idiom can still give rise to non-ironic derivative words.

I don't think it's entirely non-ironic. I think the term acknowledges the inherent risk in the situation. You are attempting something statistically impossible. So many of these ventures do not pan out.

I think we are obviously quibbling, but that's okay. I think it's not about risk but the meaning is simply making something from nothing, or making much from very little.

I don't think booting my computer is inherently risky or statistically impossible

Sorry, I was referring to the term bootstrapping with regards to startup companies.

I agree that in reference to computer startup, it's just being cheeky.

You’ve never heard of a bootstrapped startup? On this site?

The term itself is not sarcastic but the concept acknowledges the inherent sarcasm of it, since the chain of programs must have an initial mover

It can and is used with both opposite meanings.

The same as how "literally" means both "literally" and "figuratively", depending on the context.

> The same as how "literally" means both "literally" and "figuratively", depending on the context.

I disagree with that analysis. It's true that "literally" is often used when the modified phrase is figurative, but that's not quite the same thing is it meaning "figuratively" - were we to remove the "literally" the utterance would not be more likely to be interpreted as literal. The role it's serving is as an intensifier, and I contend that it's a fairly ordinary example of hyperbole. In the same way, when someone says "you left me waiting for days" we don't say that sometimes days means a handful of minutes depending on context, but that sometimes people exaggerate.

(And I recognize that at least one sufficiently respected dictionary disagrees with me; I think they got it wrong.)

I think it's still used that way. Exclusively. Someone saying "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" is not claiming that it is possible to do so, they are cynically disclaiming their own responsibility in the act.

Pretty sure the origin of this in tech came from compilers, where it actually is almost magical which the analogy does drive home pretty well (though exaggerating a tiny bit).

Don't know about that but the origin I'm aware of for "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" are the tales of Baron Munchhausen, who is supposed to be a fantastical liar telling tall tales that are clearly ridiculous. Specifically I think he retells an adventure that involves him pulling himself out of quicksand (which btw also does not behave in reality as it does in fiction) by pulling on his own bootstraps.

So I guess the original use does kinda resemble "an incredible feat that strains belief" with the difference that it is supposed to be incredible because it's physically impossible to pull off. The current use for "making sensible spending decisions" seems to be the result of the phrase being overused to the point where the feats it describes become increasingly mundane.

I don't have experience with quicksand, but one can retrieve a stuck boot (that you're still standing in) from thick mud by pulling up on your bootstrap (or where it would be). You break the suction by lifting the heel, but the foot itself pulls out of the boot, so you have to free yourself by your bootstrap ... you just can lift yourself into the air that way!

The idea with quicksand was that you would keep sinking in it until you drown (imagine it as a bottomless pit). So pushing down on it would only get you stuck further. Pulling on your bootstraps would do nothing because by pulling on them you would need to push down elsewhere and thus still continue to sink.

In reality you can't drown in quicksand because it's more dense than the human body. To avoid getting stuck it's entirely sufficient to just move slowly to loosen it and break the suction as with mud. Pulling on your bootstraps is useful to free your boots but entirely unnecessary to simply free yourself. But this expression refers to escaping the fictional trope, not the real thing.

Well that's pretty wild, I can now add "windmills were a tax thing" to the pile of random facts I never thought I'd know.

Are you sure? If the windmill didn't make milling more efficient, and if hand milling at home was an effective tax dodge, people would avoid using the windmills.

And the tax collector coming to the house is just as oppressive as being taxed at the windmill.

A quick web search suggests windmills increased grain production by a factor of 5.

> However the main reason to switch from hand mills to windmills was that it was far easier for the miller to collect taxes when the grain was milled than for tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there.

I think you’re mixing cause (larger windmills are more efficient, making it a win to centralize them) with effect (that makes it easier to tax flour production).

If that were the main reason, we would have stories about people clandestinely milling at home. I’m not aware of any.

(I also think, but am not sure, milling already was centralized before the introduction of wind power)

It'd be interesting to see if the initial windmills when introduced were more efficient, post-tax and capex, than traditional methods.

There's a parallel with grains: staples like rice and wheat are more legible to states than other alternatives like legumes, tubers, and starch plants, even though the latter were comparable in terms of calories generated by unit labor. E.g. many roots are buried and hidden from tax collectors. States which enforced cultivation of the legible grains had a greater tax base and outcompeted those that didn't.

That's not very convincing. Before the introduction of the potato, there were no below-ground alternatives that were superior to cereals in Europe and Northern Africa.

> E.g. many roots are buried and hidden from tax collectors.

Those roots tend to be attached to green stuff that's above ground and very visible. Why should that be any less legible to tax collectors than wheat or rice?

> Those roots tend to be attached to green stuff that's above ground and very visible. Why should that be any less legible to tax collectors than wheat or rice?

It's a combination of factors. Cereals like wheat and rice tend to ripen seasonally and simultaneously. They do so visibly, and must be harvested soon after. So a state sends its tax collectors around when the grains are ready to be harvested, and the amount that was generated is immediately visible. They also keep well: tubers go bad relatively quickly (and can be kept underground until actually needed for consumption), while rice and wheat can be transported over long distances and times with an order of magnitude less loss.

Consider the case of the Incas. As a civilization, they relied on two crops for calories and nutrition: maize and potatoes. Despite that, efforts at taxation primarily focused on maize, because it was so much better suited for taxes and commerce (though they did eventually invent a way to freeze dry potatoes).

I assume people didn't have mills at home for the same reason most people of today don't have full blown data centers at home. People did have mortars though like today's people have PCs and smartphones.

I think you're wrong to assume that of two things that co-evolved, one thing had to cause the other.

People didn't have giant millstones at home, but (IIUC) had various forms of handmill at home at various times and places.

Interestingly, per https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-... several Mediterranean cultures equipped their soldiers with handmills, with the Romans also including sickles so they could process grain from the fields they were marching near, allowing an earlier campaign season then were they forced to wait for it to be harvested.

You'd have a quern at home, at least in Scotland, probably most of England too.

> If that were the main reason, we would have stories about people clandestinely milling at home. I’m not aware of any.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quern-stone#Laws_against_use

Laws against a thing often indicate that it was enough of a thing to be a problem, although there are exceptions.

Thanks!

Home mills -- that were small enough to keep hidden from a surprise inspection -- might be fine for small amounts but unlikely efficient enough for full harvests.

Flour spoils much faster then unmilled grain. So the bulk of the grain would always be left as grain for storage. Armies would be the ones who would want to bulk mill an entire harvest taken from a region.

For those without access to windmills, the daily grind would produce flour/ meal for that day.

People did clandestinely mill at home. It was treated as a serious crime. There are specific historical laws about this and the punishments were pretty severe. It was something the lords were quite concerned about.

Reading Don Quixote was fairly mindblowing in general because the humor seemed so modern... in a time when the novel as we know it was itself a recent invention.

Now your fun fact makes it even more mindblowing.

Today in the US the 3 music industry giants tax(via legally required license fees) the venues where musicians play instead of taxing the musicians for the exact same reason. The venue doesn't come and go as quickly and has a set location. Musicians change band names, people, etc often and are harder to track.

> tax collectors to go to every peasant and collect taxes there

I suspect that this individual collection raised the risk of getting a beating if the peasantry was in dire straits. (drought, raiding, over taxation, etc.).

Inefficiency isn’t all bad.

Do you have a citation? I'm not nearly confident enough to think you're wrong, but I'm surprised early 1600s Spain wasn't already provisioned with wind- or watermills and I'd be curious to learn more of the context.

It was from in a philosophy course I took 30 years ago. I didn't keep the textbook, but I wish I had.

Its kind of funny, but that article itself has some misconceptions. Bullets flying overhead don't sound like that. Its more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTuuOiWgVZ0

But just like we’ve now come to accept again, through modern productions, that horses’ hooves don’t sound like coconut when running on dirt, we might start accepting that medieval pigs looked different.

The question is rather how feasible that is to depict with consistency.

the period accurate pigs don't look that weird.

Off topic, but this is why all guns sound like they are just a bucket of screws being shaken around. It may surprise movie goers to realize that guns don't make noise unless you cycle the action or fire them.

I can't think of an example of this off the top of my head, do you have one?

I'm just coming up with a lot of counter-examples - anytime a character with a gun is sneaking around in silence, when not actively using the gun. Like, I can't think of a time a character tried to sneak around but took a step and their gun rattled...

I think he's referring to the ka-clack of gun cocking noises that is used when a weapon is drawn, even if it's a weapon that doesn't have to be cocked.

Sometimes, if the other person doesn't get the hint, they cock it again!

It's the sound they make when they are picked up or handed out.

Guns being handled (picked up, shifted to the other shoulder, handed out, just any time they're being handled) tend to make lots of little clacking noises in movies and TV, as if all the parts are really loose and rattling against one another.

It's the little subtle clacking sound that some games play when player moves around or a gun is handled in some way. Like here: https://twitter.com/intellegint/status/1576087308121432065 - when the player starts running there's a rattling noise

This is one of those things that's hard to recall, but impossible to miss once it's pointed out. In that respect, I'm sorry. Watch this video from the otherwise-on-point John Wick.

Everything just .. rattles. Even the magazines, like they're just bags of bullets or something.

Nevermind the noises the knives make when he picks them up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIalODmFrZk

or

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IDtenBMN0o

The noise when he tilts the rifle is a really good illustration, thanks.

Some of the other ones I honestly never even noticed, like picking it up off the stand - I would've thought that was just the stand shaking from having it taken off.

"I wouldn't use a gun that sounded like that" - me to my wife just about every time we watch an action movie

The simple "punch" sound is even more obvious example of movie sound design tropes. I remember getting into a fight as a child and being surprised at how quiet hitting a dude was.

As a side note, the apex of coconut use is in Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Python_and_the_Holy_Grai...

>Originally the knight characters were going to ride real horses, but after it became clear that the film's small budget precluded real horses (except for a lone horse appearing in a couple of scenes), the Pythons decided their characters would mime horse-riding while their porters trotted behind them banging coconut shells together. The joke was derived from the old-fashioned sound effect used by radio shows to convey the sound of hooves clattering.

And on the same subject, quoting the tvtropes article linked above:

> Ironically, in a major sense-of-humour failure, Monty Python founder Eric Idle threatened to sue an independent film-maker who used the "that's not a horse - you're using coconuts!" gag, claiming he had originated it for Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Saner counsel prevailed, when it was pointed out to him exactly how old the gag was, and that (for instance) a radio comedy show Idle himself had written for had used this gag way back in the 1960's - ten years before the Holy Grail movie. And the BBC radio comedy archives preserved older examples still...

>People don’t care about period accuracy, they care about art that matched their expectations.

Then let's not educate people as they might get upset to discover their assumptions were false.

What if people start believing 2 + 2 = 5?

Unless the purpose of the game is educational, I don't think it's incumbent on them to educate their players about anything. Just like I don't expect everyone who sells something at the Renaissance Faire to use medieval furnaces for their blacksmithing or to eschew lathes for turning wood bowls. It's not their responsibility.

But the education will happen, whether you mean it to or not. Most people have nothing but what they see to base they're expectations on, so if they see your game, and don't specifically read about pig herding in the middle ages, your game comprises the total information in their head on the topic. Congratulations, you're an educator! Now take some responsibility.

Your point about authentic fabrication methods is entirely orthogonal. It's really hard to see why you brought that up.

That responsibility is optional and it's fine for people to decline. It is also fine for someone like the author of this blog to highlight the topic so that some people may make choices to accurately depict pigs.

It Is entirely unnecessary to bring morality into it.

The thing about morality is that the details can differ from person to person, including what should or should not be covered by morality. Nothing wrong with advocating for your beliefs, especially if it comes with an argument about the impact on others.

Perhaps you didn't mean to, but I think you've made an even stronger claim than @DeathArrow was trying to make. Following your logic, you have an obligation to all the English-learners who may believe your English errors are the proper way to write in English.

Yes, I did, but not quite as strong as you're portraying it either. As an artist or other creator, you have to balance the inevitable impressions people will get against other concerns, notably that of never finishing. But you absolutely can't ignore it.

If your statement does not apply to your post, then the lines are blurry enough that your demand that people "take responsibility for it" seems far too prescriptive. Even claiming one "absolutely can't ignore it" (emphasis added) seem unsupportable.

Do you want to point out a specific error in my use of English that's bad enough to make me a hypocrite, or are you just being pedantic for the hell of it? Bright-line rules about what you must or mustn't do are an unreasonable expectation in the domain of creating complex artistic artifacts. But if you know that what you create has an effect on people, and you don't care whether that effect is good or bad, well, I don't see what other possible basis you could have for morality or ethics.

This is barely debatable when it comes to chemical pollution, or building technology that enables predatory businesses, or even mental and ideological concerns like carelessly spreading falsehood because it benefits your political allies. Fiction is not so different, and in some ways just as powerful, just as dangerous. Why is it even a question whether this should be taken seriously?

First, I'm going to address your tone, because you are coming across as unnecessarily hostile and rude, not just to me, but also to the first poster you responded to.

My criticism in my follow up post is because you're offering a bright line rule but being very murky about when that rule applies.

You were offered my example, which was not pedantic but silly in order to make a point. You also rejected the Renaissance fair example which seems a pretty decent analog to the pigs because it is both a creative endeavor and meant to be authentic. Why precisely you rejected that idea isn't clear; my best guess is that you rejected it because the method of creation doesn't matter to you. I think, though, that there is some argument to be made either way on whether an item can be authentic if created without using authentic methods.

> But if you know that what you create has an effect on people, and you don't care whether that effect is good or bad, well, I don't see what other possible basis you could have for morality or ethics.

We are talking about misrepresenting medieval pigs, so if you want people to buy this appeal, you better explain what effect you think this will have on people's lives. (And you should then also explain why thinking an English mistake is correct won't have an equal or stronger effect on people's lives).qual effect but for a much larger subset of people.

> This is barely debatable when it comes to chemical pollution, or building technology that enables predatory businesses, or even mental and ideological concerns like carelessly spreading falsehood because it benefits your political allies.

These are intentional acts that are completely different than ignorantly or apathetically meeting an existing expectation of how pigs look as a small piece of a larger work.

> Fiction is not so different, and in some ways just as powerful, just as dangerous. Why is it even a question whether this should be taken seriously?

This isn't the same claim. Maybe this is what you originally meant, but what you said is that people have an obligation to educate rather than lean into existing expectations when endeavoring creatively; and you said it in the context of the pigs.

There are over 300 comments in this thread alone. There are only so many big budget medieval video games. The impact of a single comment on the english education of a random reader is simply not comparable to that of a game getting the pigs wrong.

I wasn't saying video games should educate people, I was referring about not meeting demands of the people with absurd expectation about reality.

If everyone believes 2+2=5 and a video game tells them otherwise I think they would rather trust their gut than assume a video game of all things is correct.

That is a fun article, but they left out my favorite: the dial tone when someone hangs up.

Speaking of phones, it's interesting to see movies' choices about the UI on mobile phones. Do they try to show something like a real phone, or do they give a simplified UI that the audience can read at a glance?

I remember seeing the Net as a teen, and in the climactic scene when the bad guys were trying to break into the room, and Sandra Bullock was hacking their computer and waiting tensely for a progress bar to finish, while it slowly crept towards completion and the bangs on the door got louder, the audience could see it and read . . . "resolving IP address."

DNS resolvers can be slow, ya know.

I believe Matrix 2 had an actual proper hacking scene. All command line, showing a script exploiting some ssh vulnerability that was actually real at the time they filmed.

> But then, the film does take place in the future. Is Zalewski surprised to see unpatched SSH servers running in the year AD 2199? "It's not that uncommon for people to run the old distribution," he says. "I know we had a bunch of boxes that were unpatched for two years."

Zalewski here is a security analyst.

At least that's one thing that's improved, but I suppose this was the era of SQL injections in every second website.

Interactible computers in general are common in video games. But rarely does the interface even have nearly the complexity as a real OS. I imagine there must be some games that go all the way and run an actual OS in a VM or emulator though. Similarly to some games that let you play the predecessor/inspiration from an in-game device like e.g. Day of the Tentacle which includes a fully playable Maniac Mansion.

Total off topic, but I followed the link to read about the Coconut Effect. Not looking at the URL, I ended up about 10 tabs deep before I realized it was friggin tvtropes!! I haven't been over there in a while, but I'm glad to see that site still has that effect on people.

> period-accurate pigs it would have been a meme about how weird and alien the pigs look.

That apparently wasn't a problem for the listed counter-example: "Kingdom Come: Deliverance"

I don't know how truthfully they've handled it, but historical accuracy is one of the main selling points of KC:D. I've only heard about the game through word-of-mouth, but that's been the most repeated detail I've heard. Less fantasy and hollywood, and a more accurate representation of the time period.

One of the main features listed on their Steam page:

> Historical accuracy: Meet real historical characters and experience the genuine look and feel of medieval Bohemia.

It's worth pointing out that the "historical accuracy" comes less from a medievalist perspective and more of an appeal to tradition. The characters and setting are often amazingly historically accurate in some parts while following the same old revisionist tropes in others. Given some of the political statements of the developers, this isn't all too surprising.

It's a bit like reconstructing a vision of the 1950s US by exclusively looking at 1950s TV ads. Yes, you'll get a lot of details right to an astonishing extent but the result will not at all be representative of what living in the 1950s was actually like.

The kung-foley point is the best example for me because I've seen fight scenes in old films that didn't have any of the sound effects. It was unsettling how quiet it was and it actually felt (more) fake.

Except of course the very coconut that this effect is named after has long since died: TV and film doesn't use cococnuts for hooves anymore except when warranted, and people aren't weirded out by horse tread sounding like what horses sound like.

The coconut effect exists as a self-reinforcing problem that is easily broken but for people going "but the coconut effect!". Repetition familiarises: if all the games you play start showing period-accurate pigs, then after a few games that force a bit more realism into your experience you stop going "my immersion!" and instead go "oh neat, this is what they looked like in the era this game is set in?" and then immediately move on because you're not here to start a period-accurate pig farming business.

...usually...

Representations of computer screens in movies generally fall under this category

Period accuracy, especially in the context of medieval settings, is championed by a very small-yet-vocal minority of gamers. But it's a essentially a bad faith argument used to criticize the existence of non-white characters in a game.

Basically, 'period accuracy' is to racists what 'ethics in gaming journalism' is to misogynists. But a Venn diagram of these two groups is pretty much just a circle.

I want my spaceships to rumble and whoosh.

Not a gamer, but aren't games trying to differentiate themselves? A weird pig would be good thing.