The Reclaimed Lexicon
Every word in the merch line makes a claim: this business term secretly comes from the farm. This is the fact-check ledger behind it. Sourced against etymonline (or equivalent), the same standard that caught the STOCK shirt’s etymology before we let it keep shipping wrong.
160 of 160 terms
“weather, we've been reading it for generations”
–Cloud computing = 1990s network-diagram shorthand for the internet, unrelated to weather forecasting
“livestock eat it, your app just scrolls it”
–Ordinary Old English 'fedan' (to nourish), not a livestock-specific coinage
“we have real ones, at scale, in the herd”
–'Bug' for a technical defect predates computing by decades (1870s), unrelated to insects or livestock
“from actual bootstraps, the leather kind”
✓From the literal leather loop on a boot (1870s); real object, though not agricultural
“we know what viral spread actually costs, in dead animals”
–Borrows from virology/epidemiology, not agriculture
“we know exactly what doesn't, and why”
–General 'scale' (proportion/size), no agricultural lineage
“we invented the concept”
✓Old English 'hærfest' (autumn) → 'gathering of crops' by mid-13c. Literal, original agricultural sense.
“same (as Harvest)”
✓Old English 'sæd': the literal plant-propagation root every figurative 'seeding' use derives from
“hay, still is”
?Fork-tools share a Latin root, but computing's 'fork' comes from 'fork in the road,' not demonstrably hay-forking
“water, ask anyone in the West”
–First recorded 1859 as a general pipe-conduit; figurative 'channel' sense (business) dates to 1921, not water-specific
“literal, underground, older than your tech stack”
–General branching/base metaphor from the plant sense, no unique claim asserted
“we call that 'a good year'”
–2010 Silicon Valley coinage (Sean Ellis), no agricultural word history
“we call that 'a drought'”
–Literal combustion metaphor, not agricultural derivation
“however long until the loan runs out”
–Bonus find: OED's earliest sense (1820s) is a beaten path made by animals to feeding grounds, predating aviation (1909)
“we have the original herd, it has hooves”
✓Old English 'heord' = literal domestic-animal groups; extension to people only from c. 1400
“a product launch vs a genuine emergency”
–True origin is agricultural even though the copy doesn't assert it: Mexican Spanish 'estampida,' American cattle-driving, 1830s
“data vs 1,400-pound animals”
–True origin: 'wrangler' (horse/cattle handler), American West, first recorded 1888
“stakeholders vs actual stock”
–True origin: Spanish 'corral,' pen for horses/cattle, 1580s
“the whole discipline is named after a hot iron and a hide”
✓OE 'brand' (burning); hot-iron cattle mark 1550s, extended to trademark sense 1827–1854
“an unbranded calf, that's the whole word”
✓Named for Samuel A. Maverick, Texas rancher who left cattle unbranded, attested 1867
“the team vs the herd, on horseback”
✓'Round up' = drive/gather cattle specifically by 1847; noun 'roundup' 1869, generalized later
“we named the company after the joke”
✓BCG growth-share matrix (1970s) built directly on the literal cow-as-repeat-income metaphor
“we do the literal version at 5 a.m.”
✓Figurative extension of literally milking a cow for all it yields, attested early 1600s
“dairy, it's dairy, it floats to the top”
✓Cream literally rises to the top of milk; 'cream of the crop' phrase, 19th c. US
“the bull is ours”
?Leading theory ties bull/bear to 18th-c. bull- and bear-baiting blood sports, not cattle ranching. First attested 1714.
“an audition, named for how we move stock”
✓Coined by analogy to herding cattle, first recorded in show business c. 1950–55
“a real thing, a sheep, that's black”
✓Literal black-fleeced sheep, whose wool couldn't be dyed and was less valuable. Idiom from early 17th c.
“a threshing floor, an actual chore, now a KPI”
✓Literal threshing/winnowing of grain, an ancient agricultural process
“the joke only lands because herding is real and hard”
–Comparative joke: asserts no shared word origin
“we cultivate the actual ground”
✓Latin 'cultivare/cultus': literal farming sense before the figurative 'cultivate relationships' (1680s+)
“the roots of the grass, in the ground, where we've been”
✓Literal grass roots; figurative 'fundamental level' 1901, political 'rank and file' 1912 (T. Roosevelt campaign)
“we ran reapers before you had a word for 'yield'”
✓OE 'ripan,' to cut/gather grain. Direct figurative extension of the literal harvest action.
“now it's finance, it was always the field”
✓Crop/harvest sense attested mid-15c, predating the modern financial 'rate of return' sense
“literal, it has fruit in it”
✓'Fruit' + '-ful,' Middle English, used of trees/land bearing fruit before the figurative 'productive' sense
“you have to pick fruit to know the low ones go first”
–Comparative image, not a claim the idiom was coined by farmers
“for ideas, you say, for everything, we say”
–Comparative juxtaposition, no word-history claim
“in a meeting vs in the dirt, in April”
–Juxtaposition only, no disputed fact asserted
“a good year, a real one, with actual bushels”
–Pure juxtaposition, not a claim that tech co-opted this term
“your field of work vs ours, with a fence around it”
–Ordinary semantic extension of literal land, no unique claim
“candidates vs a whole season”
–Juxtaposition of literal vs figurative 'weed out,' attested since the 1600s
“'grafting' as slang for hard work. It's a horticulture technique.”
✕Same pattern as BEHOOVE: 'hard graft' (labor) is from a Germanic root meaning 'to dig,' an unrelated homonym of horticultural 'graft' (Greek 'grapheion'). Myth check: not a known myth. Zero independent circulation found.
“we watched the orchard blossom before it was a campus”
–Company-history comparison, not a general etymological claim
“you reap what you sow, the whole proverb is ours”
✓Literal agricultural proverb (sowing/reaping crops), popularized via Galatians 6:7
“rooted in our values vs rooted in the actual ground”
–Juxtaposition, no unique claim
“a stream of water, we irrigate with it”
✓Media/data 'streaming' is a direct metaphorical extension of literal continuous water flow
“flooding the market vs a real thing that takes a season”
–Comparative juxtaposition, no unique origin claim
“a watershed moment, it's a geographic feature”
✓Hydrological drainage-divide term, metaphorized by the mid-1800s
“the whole upstream vs downstream of business is a river”
✓Business 'upstream/downstream' (supply chain, oil & gas) is a direct metaphor from river flow direction
“a sales slump vs the thing that ends operations”
–Comparative juxtaposition
“we weather it in the barn at 2 a.m.”
–Comparative juxtaposition, not an etymological claim
“we know exactly how rare fair weather is”
–Comparative juxtaposition, no unique origin claim
“a sick animal, originally”
✕Nautical slang ('under the weather bow,' seasick sailors during storms), not sick livestock. Myth check: not a known myth. Zero independent circulation; the real popular belief is the (true) sailor/seasickness story.
“what the tires need in the mud, now a metric”
–Comparative juxtaposition, not an etymology claim
“we didn't have a word for that, we just did the work”
–Copy explicitly disclaims a shared word: pure contrast
“separating grain, see also 'hashing it out'”
✕'Hash' (hashing it out, hash function) is from French 'hacher' (to chop), unrelated to 'thresh' (OE þrescan), different word families. Myth check: minor circulation. Genuine thresh/hash confusion is discussed in etymology-nerd circles, not a viral fact.
“the grind, rise and grind, we grind actual feed”
–Comparative juxtaposition only
“see above, literal”
–Same comparison; copy itself calls it 'literal,' not an etymology claim
“plowing through the backlog, we plow”
✓Direct figurative extension of the literal verb 'plow'
“same plow”
✓Same figurative extension of the literal agricultural verb
“the tractor, it has a throttle”
✕Generic steam-engine term (1824/1848), not specific to farm tractors. Myth check: not a known myth. Zero independent circulation found.
“laying the groundwork, that's just breaking ground”
?ME 'ground-worke' = a building's literal foundation, not specifically agricultural ground-breaking. Conflated with the separate phrase 'break ground'.
“you break ground on a building, we break ground with a plow”
✓Attested 1670s meaning 'to dig, plow'; figurative 'begin to execute a plan' by 1709. Predates the modern ceremony sense.
“the actual hardware, on the actual equipment”
–True but non-exclusive fact, no historical-origin claim
“that's bailing. Baling hay is real and more relevant.”
–Correct homophone distinction (bale vs bail are unrelated words), not an etymology claim
“short for livestock, your entire market is named after cattle”
✕Backwards, and already shipped as SKU CC-028: general 'stock' (supply/wealth) is attested early–mid 1400s, before livestock (1510s) and before corporate stock (1610s). Both are separate branches off the older sense, not parent/child. Myth check: minor circulation. Plausible-sounding but no dedicated debunk pages exist for it; reads as a reasonable guess, not an established myth.
“you hold stock, we held the original stock, it ate grass”
✕Same reversal as STOCK: rests on the false premise that livestock came first. Myth check: rides on the same minor-circulation Stock myth above, not independently established.
“the word 'stock' in finance is a descendant of this”
✕Financial 'stock' is not a descendant of livestock: livestock (1520s) is itself a compound formed from the older general 'stock' sense. Myth check: rides on the same minor-circulation Stock myth above, not independently established.
“Ranch dressing, a whole aesthetic named after the place”
✓Ranch dressing was invented by Steve and Gayle Henson at their working dude ranch, renamed Hidden Valley Ranch. Literally named after a real ranch.
“a real egg, left in the nest, to encourage the hen”
✓Real/artificial egg left in a nest to induce hens to keep laying, from the 14th c.; figurative 'money saved' by 1686
“same nest, same bird”
✓Literal bird behavior of lining a nest with feathers for warmth. Idiom attested from the 16th c.
“the entire concept of not over-forecasting is a chicken proverb”
✓Traces to Aesop's 'The Milkmaid and Her Pail'; in English by Shakespeare (c.1600) and Butler's Hudibras (1663), a genuine poultry-husbandry proverb
“diversification, invented by someone carrying actual eggs”
✓Rooted in the literal risk of carrying market eggs in a single basket; earliest widely-cited use is Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605)
“okay that one's mining, but we'll take the vibe”
–Mining idiom, not agricultural. The doc itself correctly flags this as off-thesis.
“a real line, on a real farm/prison boundary”
✕Coined 1864 at Andersonville Civil War prison camp (a shoot-on-sight boundary), not a farm boundary. Myth check: not a known myth, and riskier than the others. The real Andersonville prison-camp origin is already the famous 'did you know,' so a farm-boundary claim would compete with a true story rather than repeat a false one.
“a field, ballpark figure is a field measurement”
✕'Ballpark' (1893) is a baseball park; figurative 'ballpark figure' (1954) traces to Cold War missile-testing jargon, not farm fields. Myth check: not a known myth. Zero independent circulation found.
“testing, in a field, the original field”
–'Field' is a generic multi-domain word (military, sports, academic, agricultural), no specific ag-etymology claim
“a whole style of aviation, named after the barn”
✓Coined 1815 for itinerant theater troupes performing in actual rural barns; extended to stunt pilots by 1928
“a dollar, from buckskin, the animal funded the currency”
?'Buck' for dollar (1856) is only 'perhaps' from buckskin-trade currency (1748); a competing sawbuck theory exists, and buckskin trade involved deer, not livestock
“a row of shrubs marking a field boundary, finance is named after landscaping”
✓OE 'hecg' (shrub-row boundary), extended to 'limit risk' by mid-14c, then specifically to financial hedging by the 1600s
“animal husbandry gave us the management concept, now it's an MBA”
✕Backwards: general household-management sense (c.1300) is older than the farm/animal-management narrowing (late 14c). Myth check: not a known myth. Zero independent circulation found.
“lying fallow for a creative break, it's a field resting on purpose”
✓OE 'fealh/felg' (plowed, unseeded land). The figurative idle/resting sense develops directly from this.
“how much a team of oxen could plow in a day”
✓In late Old English, an acre was exactly this: the amount a yoke of oxen could plow in a day, later fixed by 13th-c. statute
“a measure, from the yard, the farmyard”
✕'Yard' (measuring rod, OE gyrd) and 'yard' (farmyard enclosure, OE geard) are two separate Old English words. Yardstick is not from the farmyard. Myth check: not a known myth. Zero independent circulation found.
“now it's military countermeasures and corporate jargon”
✓WWII radar-countermeasure 'chaff' was named by metaphorical analogy to agricultural chaff for its lightweight, scattering behavior
“fruit the wind knocked down, free apples, now a bonus”
✓Mid-15c term for fruit/wood knocked down by wind and free for the taking; figurative 'unexpected gain' from the 1540s
“funding a venture, from 'grub,' the food you staked someone”
✕Coined c.1863–76 in American western mining slang (grub 'food' + stake 'share') to fund prospectors, not a farming term. Myth check: not a known myth. Zero independent circulation found.
“the actual Act that built the West”
✓Homestead Act of 1862 granted 160 acres of public land to settlers who lived on and farmed it for five years. Directly agricultural, historically documented.
“a real hole, for a pigeon, now how you feel at work”
✓1570s term for actual dovecote nesting recesses; extended to desk compartments by the 1680s, figuratively 'categorize' by 1870
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✓Old English 'feoh' meant cattle and movable wealth before it ever meant money. You're still getting paid in livestock, just abstracted.
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✓From Latin 'pecunia,' money, which is just 'pecu,' cattle, in a suit. Even Cicero knew wealth once meant livestock.
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✓Embezzling company funds is named for Latin 'peculium,' private property, which originally meant one thing: cattle
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✓Capital, cattle, and chattel are the same word three times over, all descended from Latin 'capitale': property counted by the head
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✓Chattel is cattle's twin, both sprung from Medieval Latin 'capitale,' back when net worth walked on four legs
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✓Your emolument is named for a miller's cut of the grind: Latin 'emolumentum' comes straight from 'molere,' to grind grain
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✓Every 'org chart silo' is named after the pit farmers dug to store grain. The metaphor just forgot it used to be literal.
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✓'Granular' data is named after Latin 'granum' (grain) because someone had to describe things small enough to count like seeds
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✓To fleece an investor is to shear him. The swindling sense comes directly from stripping wool off a sheep.
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✓Market panic is named for Pan, the god who spooked grazing flocks with noises in the woods. Traders just inherited the herd's fear.
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✓To garner profits is to store them like grain: 'garner' comes from Latin 'granarium,' a granary
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✓Gleaning insights from data is named for gathering the stray grain reapers left behind in the field
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✓Every tally started as a notched stick. The word comes from Latin 'talea,' the same term for a plant cutting stuck in the ground to grow.
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✓A fund's 'vintage year' is borrowed wholesale from winemaking: 'vintage' literally means the grape harvest of a given season
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✓'Grist for the mill' isn't a stale metaphor: grist is, and always was, the actual grain brought to be ground
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✓A seasoned investor is named for a field's sowing time: 'season' comes from Latin 'sationem,' the act of planting
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✓Your shares of stock and a plowshare are the same word. Both trace to Old English 'sceran,' to cut, because a share was always a piece cut off the whole.
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✓'Churn' meant agitating cream into butter for five centuries before it meant customers agitating their way out the door. Same violent motion, different product.
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✓The first 'business incubator' (Batavia, NY, 1959) got its name because the building's other tenant was a literal chicken hatchery. Founder Joseph Mancuso just kept the metaphor running.
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✓A bellwether was the actual lead sheep of the flock, bell strapped around its neck so the shepherd could hear where the rest had wandered
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✓Coined by a Norwegian zoologist who spent his childhood watching real chickens establish rank by pecking each other on a farm outside Oslo
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✓Counting people 'by head' is a direct lift from counting cattle 'by head,' attested since the 1510s. HR has been doing livestock math this whole time.
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✓Literally a notch cut into a cow or sheep's ear to prove ownership. By 1868 the same word was already being used to earmark money.
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✓Originally described young cattle and oxen with fresh, unweathered horns. By the 1680s any wet-behind-the-ears hire got the same label the ranch gave its calves.
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✓'Ripe' meant fit for reaping before it meant fit for a hostile takeover. Both describe something ready to be picked clean.
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✓Horse traders judged a horse's age by how far its gums had receded, making the teeth look longer. Your 'legacy platform' is just an old plow horse.
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✓The literal behavior of a horse grinding its teeth against the metal bit in its bridle, impatient to run
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✓'Cull the herd' isn't a euphemism HR invented. Since 1889 it's meant selecting livestock by quality and removing the weak ones.
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✓The literal fate of a draft horse too old to plow: turned loose in a field to graze until it dies
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✓Meant an actual farm horse bred and worked for labor as far back as the 1540s, long before it meant your most reliable spreadsheet
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✓A yeoman was a commoner who farmed his own land: 'yeoman's service' meant the unglamorous, essential agricultural labor that kept medieval England fed
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✓Before it meant 'building it from scratch with no legacy code,' a greenfield was literal undeveloped farmland no bulldozer had touched
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✓Poaching meant trespassing onto someone else's land to steal their game. By 1611 the same word was already used for stealing employees.
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✓A literal cow, revered in Hindu tradition as untouchable. By 1900 English had borrowed the concept for any policy nobody's allowed to question. Note: this is Hindu religious imagery, not Western ranch culture: a values-fit call for this brand, not an accuracy problem
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✓Meant produce grown in your own garden instead of bought at market since the 1640s. 'Homegrown talent' is just bragging your hire wasn't store-bought.
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✓The figurative 'hatch a plan' comes straight from birds hatching eggs, attested by the early 14th century
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✓Before it meant an engineer who ships straight to prod with no review, 'cowboy' meant exactly what it sounds like: obvious, but true, and worth having
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✓Hunters trained real horses to hide behind while sneaking up on game. By the 1610s it already meant any decoy masking someone else's real move.
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?Widely repeated donkey-and-dangled-carrot story, but the literal-farm-trick account is treated as folk explanation by some etymologists. The phrase's earliest documented use is metaphorical (economics writing), not a described farm practice. Verify further before shipping
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✓Herbalists' shop-talk: herbs already harvested and dried for sale, as opposed to the stuff still growing in the ground
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✓A horse gets frisky after a good feed of oats. American English borrowed the swagger by 1831.
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?The 'currying a horse named Fauvel' medieval-poem story is a popular explanation, but some etymologists treat it as a folk-etymology overlay on a genuinely obscure phrase. Worth a second check before treating as ironclad.
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✓A 'walk' was the pen where a single fighting cock was kept and would tolerate no rivals: dominance, one bird per enclosure
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✓What bulls, rams, and deer literally do when they fight. American English put the image to work by 1839.
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✓The most credible account is the plainest one: a bull safely tethered in the barnyard could actually be grabbed that way
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✓Raw wool dyed before it's spun holds color permanently, unlike fabric dyed after weaving, a metaphor for anything that won't fade
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✓Once meant literally collecting stray tufts of wool snagged on hedges and fences as sheep wandered by. A lot of wandering for very little wool.
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✓The better cuts of pork sit higher on the animal. The wealthy ate high on the hog while everyone else got the belly and trotters.
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✓Medieval market fraud: farmers sold piglets sight-unseen in a sack ('poke'), and a lazy buyer might get home to find a cat instead
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✓Literally what you feed chickens: cheap grain, priced accordingly, which is why it means an insultingly small amount of money
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✓Chickens hatched in spring were the tender, high-priced birds; anything past its prime got called out as 'no spring chicken'
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✓'Coop' has meant a small cage built to confine poultry since the 1300s. Escaping one is exactly what it sounds like.
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✓The erratic marks chickens leave clawing at dirt for feed, applied to bad handwriting since at least 1909
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✓A zero on the scoreboard, named for the shape of an actual egg laid by an actual goose
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✓From 'corn-fed': 1920s American slang for humor that plays to unsophisticated rural taste, back when 'corn' meant everything countryside
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✓Standard breeder's terminology: when you loan out the stud dog, the deal is you get first choice of the resulting litter
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✓Exactly what it sounds like: picking only the ripest cherries off the tree and leaving the rest to rot
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✓The undersized potatoes farmers tossed aside at harvest as not worth selling. Meaning 'insignificant' since at least 1832.
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✓Holding up a piece of straw to check which way the wind is blowing: an unofficial read on which way opinion is drifting
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✓Literal wheat straws bunched in a fist, one per person, shortest one loses. A farm-byproduct lottery going back to the 1800s.
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✓The actual grass seed that shakes out of hay and ends up in a farmer's hair. 19th-century city slang for 'obviously just rolled in from the country'.
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✓Mattresses used to be cloth sacks stuffed with hay. You'd literally hit the thing to flatten it into something sleepable.
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✓Literally 'furrow-long': the length of a plowed furrow in a medieval field, roughly as far as a team of oxen could plow before a break
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✓The smallest historical unit of weight, defined as the mass of one plump, dry kernel of wheat or barley
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✓Horse height is still measured in 'hands' today: originally the width of a trader's actual hand, standardized at four inches by Henry VIII
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✓Cattle put out to graze wander back home on their own schedule: eventually, and not before dark. In print since the 1590s
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✓Ancient merchants weighed gold and gems against dried carob tree seeds because they're freakishly uniform in size
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✓Started as an actual doll stuffed with straw, propped up as a target: an opponent built to be knocked down easily, since the 1590s
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✓The proverbial last move of a drowning man: grabbing at a floating piece of straw because it's the only thing within reach, since the 1580s
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✓Short for 'the straw that broke the camel's back': one more piece of a genuinely lightweight farm byproduct, added to an overloaded pack animal
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✓Wild oats are a real weed farmers have cursed for centuries: worthless as a crop, its seeds nearly impossible to separate from the good grain
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✓The actual hooks that stretched wet wool cloth taut on a wooden frame (a 'tenter') so it would dry flat instead of shrinking
“New” categories are researched and sourced but haven’t been used in shipped copy yet: proposed additions, not corrections.
Every word here is sourced. So is the letter.
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