Igly, ugsome, ugglesome and uglisome

Igly is one of those words that isn’t in my Shorter Oxford Dictionary but it is one of a number of spellings of a word used to mean more ugly than ugly.  It appears in Chaucer’s ‘Caterbury Tales’ during the Clerk’s Tale. 

Ugsome is a more usual word and was frequent almost to the 17th century and was then revived by Sir Walter Scott in ‘The Antiquary’ (1816) – “Like an auld dog that trails its useless ugsome carcass into some bush or bracken.”    Ugglesome and uglisome were 16th century versions.  

This is ugglesome in action -

 

The Urban Dictionary defines igly as meaning both ugly and cute at the same time. In ehich case this is igly by my reckoning...

Igły is also a village in the administrative district of Gmina Stary Targ in northern Poland. I assume Igly isn’t igly.

  

Wittol

Here is another archaic word – a wittol was a man who was aware of and tolerant of his wife’s infidelity; an acquiescent cuckold. Its first known use is in the fifteenth century and it came from the Middle English witen to know and cokewold cuckold.  It was also used to simply mean a witless person – perhaps on the basis that those who ignored their wives’ infidelity were witless.

It's all grist to the mill

For this phrase I cannot do better than quote, in its entirety, the wonderful explanation by Gary Martin in The Phrase Finder.

 Meaning

All things are a potential source of profit or advantage.

Origin

 

Grist is the corn that is brought to a mill to be ground into flour. In the days when farmers took 'grist to the mill' the phrase would have been used literally to denote produce that was a source of profit.

An early figurative use of phrase is found in Arthur Golding's translation of The Sermons of J. Calvin upon Deuteronomie, 1583:

"There is no lykelihoode that those thinges will bring gryst to the mill."

There are many grist mills still in existence and they would have specialised in whatever type of cereal was commonplace in their location - wheat, buckwheat, oats, corn etc. The association between grist and mills is clear and it was also listed as proverbial in William Camden's Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine, 1605:

The horse that is next the mill, carries all the grist.

Grist is usually referred to as unground corn. When the phrase was coined, in the UK in the middle ages, corn would have meant wheat, as opposed to what is called corn in many other parts of the world, which is known as maize in the UK.

Oats that have been husked but not ground are known as grit. This is the source of the name the thick maize-based porridge that is widely available in the southern states of the USA - 'grits'. There is clearly both a linguistic and culinary connection between grist and grits, although not as straightforward a one as a simple spelling mistake - they both derive from the verb 'grind'.

'Grist to the mill' is still used, although less commonly than when I was a lad in the 1960s. Were he alive to see it, this would give some satisfaction to George Orwell, who dismissed the phrase as 'a dying metaphor' in his essay Politics and the English Language, 1946:

Dying metaphors ... a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgels for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, ...

That is a great article and I recommend anyone to use The Phrase Finder (if a phrase isn’t in this blog, of course!).

Who will bell the cat

‘Belling the Cat’ is a fable also known under the titles ‘The Bell and the Cat’ and ‘The Mice in Council’. Although often attributed to Aesop, it was not recorded before the Middle Ages and has been confused with the quite different fable of Classical origin titled ‘The Cat and the Mice’.  

The Fable concerns a group of mice who debate plans to nullify the threat of a marauding cat. One of them proposes placing a bell around its neck, so that they are warned of its approach. The plan is applauded by the others, until one mouse asks who will volunteer to place the bell on the cat. All of them make excuses. The story is used to teach the wisdom of evaluating a plan not only on how desirable the outcome would be, but also on how it can be executed. It provides a moral lesson about the fundamental difference between ideas and their feasibility, and how this affects the value of a given plan.

This illustration, for Jean de La Fontaine's fables, by Gustave Doré shows the 'rats' in council so his version of the fable must have had rats in place of mice.