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.
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.
I love living languages.
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...
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.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/one-bad-apple-...
>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.
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.
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.
Over time it became idiomatic speech for initiating something difficult
i.e. as in getting a start-up off the ground or, when shortened further, "booting" a computer.
I don't think booting my computer is inherently risky or statistically impossible
I agree that in reference to computer startup, it's just being cheeky.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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?
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 think you're wrong to assume that of two things that co-evolved, one thing had to cause the other.
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.
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.
For those without access to windmills, the daily grind would produce flour/ meal for that day.
Now your fun fact makes it even more mindblowing.
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.
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.