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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.

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> 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 common enough 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.

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

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

I love living languages.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.)

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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