trouble at (the/t’) mill

Opening of the “Spanish Inquisition” sketch, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1970) in which a man announces “trouble at t’ mill” before being interrupted by men in priestly garb claiming to be the Spanish Inquisition

19 May 2025

Trouble at t’ mill (or trouble at mill / trouble at the mill) is a British cliché used to refer to any kind of problem or disagreement. It evokes, in Lancashire dialect, some kind of accident or labor dispute at a factory. It arises out of a trope in literature and drama where a worker announces that there has been some kind of difficulty at the local factory. Through overuse by bad writers, the phrase became something of a joke.

The earliest use of the phrase that I have found in literature is actually from the United States. From a story that appeared in the December 1868 issue of Arthur’s Home Magazine:

“What’s the matter?” I asked, hurriedly.

“Why, there’s been trouble at the mill,” he said, cautiously, as if he feared to hurt me, “and I’ve brought Horace home, for he’s hurt pretty bad. Could you call Jonathan to help the men lift him out?”

I was round the back of the wagon before he had finished speaking, and gazing eagerly inside. Horace lay there with his head upon his arm, and his eyes shut, looking very pale; but I could not see that he was very much hurt, until suddenly, as the men lifted him, and in doing so loosened the blanket they had thrown over him, I saw that both limbs were fearfully crushed and mangled.

Of course, here the phrase is used quite literally and without irony.

Here’s an example in Lancashire dialect, from a story that appeared in the 1 August 1931 issue of the British Picturegoer Weekly, again a literal and unironic use:

Aitchison’s broad shoulders slumped.

“Afraid for my job,” he confessed. “Times is terrible hard oop here in Handle, Mister Kennedy. Mr. Jason is houndin’ t’ hands t’ breaking point.” His passion mounted. “T’ owed skinflint. He’s sacked more hands this mornin’ an’ let t’ rest of us know that wages is cut again.”

He pointed out towards the yard.

“T’ hands is holdin’ a meetin’ about it this minute. Mark my words, mister, there’s goin’ to’ be trouble in t’ mill!”

But by the 1950s, the phrase was widely recognized as a cliché. The following notice for the film Hindle Wakes appeared in the 15 December 1952 issue of Torquay’s Herald Express. IMDB describes the film as follows: “A cotton mill worker in Lancashire falls for her boss's son while on a Wakes Week holiday in Blackpool but enlists the aid of her girlfriend to keep it a secret to hide it from her interfering parents.” The newspaper notice of the film being shown in local theaters uses trouble a’ t’ mill to throw shade on the movie:

—And On The Other South Devon Screens

Odeons (Torquay, Paignton and Newton Abbot)—“HINDLE WAKES.” Another version of the Lancashire drama—there’s trouble a’ t’ Mill. Also “The Raiders.”

Electric—“LOST IN ALASKA.” Bud and Lou on the loose again, no reward offered. Also—“Duel At Silver Creek.”

Tudor—“DOUBLE DYNAMITE.” Medium fare for Sinatra and Jane Russell fans. For others a damp squib. Also: “Riders Of The Range.”

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Sources:

“And On The Other South Devon Screens.” Herald Express (Torquay, UK), 15 December 1952, 4/3. British Newspaper Archive.

“Holiday Week (Original title: Hindle Wakes).” IMDB.com, accessed 21 April 2025.

Mitchell, A. M. “After the Victory.” Arthur’s Home Magazine (Philadelphia), December 1868, 328/1. Gale Primary Sources: American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. trouble, n.

St. John, Val. “Screen Fever!” Picturegoer Weekly, 1 August 1931, 20. British Newspaper Archive.

Tréguer, Pascal. “A British Phrase: ‘(There’s) Trouble at T’Mill.’” Wordhistories.net, 15 May 2020.

Video credit: British Broadcasting Company (BBC) and Python (Monty) Pictures, 1970. Fair use of a brief, low-resolution clip to illustrate the topic under discussion.

grit / grits / Grits / hominy

16 May 2025

Grit can refer to sand, ground grain, moral fortitude, or a Canadian political party. As a verb, it can refer to grinding or gnashing, especially of one’s teeth. The history of this rather small word takes us on a journey encompassing Beowulf, John Smith’s seventeenth-century travel narratives, Thomas Jefferson’s feud with John Adams, Canadian politics, P. T. Barnum’s showmanship, and, of course, the cuisine of the American South.

Grit comes to us from the Old English, greot meaning sand, gravel, dirt, or earth. We can see it used to mean sand in one of the riddles in the Exeter Book, which was copied in the late tenth century. The answer to the riddle is “ship”:

Siþum sellic    ic seah searo hweorfan,
grindan wið greote,    giellende faran.

(On occasions I saw a strange device make its way, grind against the grit, travel screeching.)

The Old English word could also be used a bit more generally to mean dirt or earth. Here we have a passage in Beowulf, about the dragon’s hoard being left buried as it was cursed:

Forleton eorla gestreon    eorðan healdan,
gold on greote,    þær hit nu gen lifað,
eldum swa unnyt    swa hyt [æro]r wæs.

(They left the earth holding the warriors’ treasure, gold in the grit, where it now resides, useless to men as it was before.)

The verb, meaning to make a grinding or grating noise, doesn’t appear until centuries later. Here is an early use from Oliver Goldsmith’s 1762 The Citizen of the World:

The muse found Scroggen stretch’d beneath a rug;
A window patch’d with paper, lent a ray,
That dimly shew’d the state in which he lay;
The sanded floor that grits beneath the tread,
The humid wall with paltry pictures spread.

And the verb is frequently used in the context of gritting one’s teeth. Here is Thomas Jefferson using it in this context in a journal entry:

December the 26th, 1797. Langdon tells me, that at the second election of President and Vice-President of the United States, when there was a considerable vote given to Clinton in opposition to Mr. Adams, he took occasion to remark it in conversation in the Senate chamber with Mr. Adams, who gritting his teeth, said, “damn ’em, damn ’em, damn ’em, you see that an elective government will not do.”

Gritting one’s teeth would eventually lead to grit meaning moral fortitude, a sense that is in place by 1825 when it appears in John Neal’s novel Brother Jonathan, the character of Brother Jonathan being a representation of the people of New England. Early uses of this sense are often in the phrase clear grit:

Old Bob, I mean; proper feller, he was, too; ’cute enough, I tell you! sharp's a razor—clear grit; one o’ them air half blooded Mohawks, ’od rot ’em!

A bit north of New England, clear grit became a nickname for a reformist political faction, one that would eventually merge with the Liberal Party. We see this nickname by the mid nineteenth century, for which the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (DCHP) has a citation from the 9 August 1849 issue of the Dundas Warder:

Though it is highly desirable to carry some of the objects of the “clear grits” into effect, the circumstances of their coquetting with the ULTRA TORY party is sufficient to excite suspicion, and to put real Reformers on their guard.

The next year the Boston Daily Atlas printed a letter of 15 February 1850 that reports on the Canadian political scene:

The Annexation Association, as you will perceive by the manifesto from which I sent you extracts in my last letter, will still continue the constitutional agitation of its cause, and it will be supported by the “clear grits.”

The clear grits soon became clipped and capitalized to Grits. Another example from the DCHP is from the United Empire Loyalist of 16 September 1852:

Will the Grits desert him in this; and allow him to be accused by the government “of leaving his slime upon everything that he crawled over?”

And one still sees Grits being used as a nickname for the Liberal Party. From Toronto’s Globe and Mail of 29 April 2025:

The list of neophyte Grit MPs also includes a former Quebec finance minister, a veteran diplomat, a former president of IBM Canada and an internationally trained lawyer with an Oxford MBA.

But the noun doesn’t just refer to sand, fortitude, or a Canadian political party. It can refer to ground grain. The first grain to be so named was oats, and we have oat grits and groats from at least 1584 when it appears in Thomas Cogan’s The Hauen of Health:

For of the greates or grotes as they call them, that is to say of Otes first dried and after lighlty shaled, being boyled in water with salt they make a kinde of meate which they call water potage.

Of course, today grits are most commonly associated with hominy, and we see hominy grits by the mid nineteenth century. Here is a use of the term in an account of General Tom Thumb, a.k.a. Charles Sherwood Stratton, a dwarf who performed for P. T. Barnum, visiting Queen Victoria and her family in 1847. Stratton would have been a child of nine at the time. The account was probably written by Thomas Chandler Haliburton, who wrote in the voice of one Sam Slick:

Whereupon I clears my throat, as if I was goin to speak in Congress, and stretchin out my right hand—for an Honour Maid near me run for my cup and saucer—and said—“Get a pint of small Hominy grits; a pint of sifted Indian meal; a tea-spoonful of salt; three table-spoonfuls of fresh butter; three eggs; three table-spoonfuls of strong yeast; a quart of milk; a salt-spoonful of pearl-ash salaratus”—and there I stopt short.

Hominy is taken from the concluding morphemes in the Virginia Algonquian uskatahomen, meaning that which is ground by a pestle while uncooked. It appears in English in the writings of John Smith in 1630:

Their servants commonly feed upon Milke Homini, which is bruized Indian corne pounded, and boiled thicke, and milke for the sauce.

That’s quite a whirlwind tour of the varied history of a rather small word.

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Sources:

Berkow, Jameson. “These Newly Elected Liberal MPs from the Business World Are Contenders for Cabinet.” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 29 April 2025. ProQuest

“Canadian Correspondence of the Atlas” (15 February 1850). Boston Daily Atlas (Massachusetts), 25 February 1850, 1/7. Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers.

Cogan, Thomas. The Hauen of Health. London: Henrie Midleton for William Norton, 1584, 28–29. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, first edition, 1967, s.v. Grit, n., Clear Grit, n., Clear Grit Party, n.

Dictionary of Old English: A to Le, 2024, s.v. greot, n.

Fulk, R. D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. Klaeber’s Beowulf, fourth edition, Toronto: Toronto UP, 2008, lines 3166–68, 108.

“General Tom Thumb’s Visit to the Queen: Letter the Third.” The Albion (New York), 16 January 1847, 32/3. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Goldsmith, Oliver. The Citizen of the World, vol. 1. Dublin: George and Alexander Ewing, 1762, 127. Archive.org.

Jefferson, Thomas. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 1. Andrew A. Lipscomb, ed. Washington, D.C.: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1904, 416–417. Archive.org.

Muir, Bernard J., ed. “Riddle 32.” The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry, second edition, vol. 1 of 2. Exeter: Exeter UP, 2000, lines 3–4, 308. Exeter, Cathedral Library, MS 3501.

Neal, John. Brother Jonathan, vol. 3 of 3. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1825, 386. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v., grit, n.1, grit, v., grit, n.2; third edition, March 2019, s.v., hominy, n., hominy grits, n.

Smith, John. True Travels. London: John Haviland for Thomas Slater, 1630, 43. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Photo credit: sashafatcat, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

trigger / trigger warning

14 May 2025

A trigger warning is a notice posted at the beginning of material, such as that depicting rape or other violence, that may act as a catalyst or trigger for those suffering post-traumatic stress, so that they can mentally prepare themselves to view the material or to avoid it altogether. In the university context, there have been a number of student requests that professors provide trigger warnings for any such material that the students will encounter during their course work. There is debate over whether or not such warnings are warranted or appropriate in the university environment, and if so, how and when they should be delivered and for what types of material.

Putting aside the argument (which is actually less about the warnings per se and more a proxy and rallying flag for progressive and conservative positions in a more general political debate), where and when did the term trigger warning arise?

The term comes, of course, from the trigger of a gun or other device. Trigger is a seventeenth-century borrowing from the Dutch trekker. While the spelling trigger appears in that century, tricker was the usual English spelling until the mid eighteenth century. The OED records this use of tricker from 1621, appearing in a book on fowling. In the following passage trycker or tricker refers to the device that springs a snare:

Then hard by this loope or swickel, shall there also be fastned with stronge Horse hayre within an Inch and a halfe of the end of the plant, a little broad thin trycker, made sharpe and equall at both ends after this proportion.

And then the bigger sharpe end of the Plant being thrust and fixed hard into the ground, close by the edge of the water, the smaller end with the loope and the tricker, shall be brought downe to the first bridge, and then the hoope made pearewise being laide on the bridge, one end of the tricker shall be set vpon the nicke of the hoope, and the other end against a nicke made on the small end of the plate, which by the violence and bend of the Plant shall make them stick and hold together vntill the hoope be mooued.

In a later passage, the book uses tricker in relation to firearms:

The next Engine to these is the Gun or Fowling Piece, which is a generall Engine and may serue for any Fowle great or little whatsoeuer […] as for the shape or manner of it, tis better it be a fier locke or Snaphaunce then a cocke and tricker, for it is safer and better for carriage, readier for vse & keepes the powder dryer in all weathers, whereas the very blowing of a coale is many times the losse of the thing aymed at.

The verb to trigger appears by the turn of the twentieth century in relation to firearms. The metaphorical use of the verb meaning to cause something to happen is in place by 1930.

The earliest use of trigger warning that I can find is in the Usenet discussion group alt.sexual.abuse.recovery for 19 September 1993. The post’s subject line is “Possible movie trigger warning,” and the text reads:

I saw "Stephen King's Sleepwalkers" this weekend and it contains a possible trigger.

*************SPOILER FOR DISCUSSION OF MOVIE CONTENT***************

If you like horror movies (and I know that many of you don't, but I do) this is a pretty decent horror movie, with one exception: the 2 monsters (sleepwalkers) in the movie are a mother and son who have an incestuous sexual relationship. I think that most non-survivors would find the “romantic” scenes between the two to be pretty distasteful, but for survivors I think that the scenes could be a very strong trigger. So, consider yourself warned.

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Sources:

Markham, Gervase. Hungers Preuention: or the Whole Arte of Fowling by Water and Land. London: Augustine Mathewes for Anne Helme and Thomas Langley, 1621, 39–40, 43–44. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Mary. “Possible Movie Trigger Warning.” Usenet: alt.sexual.abuse.recovery, 19 September 1993.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s. v. trigger, n.1, trigger, v.; third edition, 2022, s.v. trigger warning, n.

Image credit: Tomchen1989, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.

slut / slut-shaming

Lillian Gish as Hester Prynne in the 1926 film The Scarlet Letter

12 May 2025

In today’s parlance, slut is a derogatory term for a woman who freely exercises her sexual agency. The word dates to the early fifteenth century and is of unknown origin. There are similar words in other Germanic languages, but their relationship to each other is unclear.

It is often said that the present-day meaning is a later development, and that slut originally referred to a slovenly, dirty, or unkempt woman. While this is technically true based on the earliest known citations of use, too much can be read into this evidence. The promiscuous sense follows hot on the heels of the slovenly sense, and when dealing with medieval manuscripts, a gap of a decade or more in the surviving texts is often not a significant difference.

We see the slovenly woman sense of slut in Thomas Hoccleve’s poem Litera Cupidinis, written in 1402, in which the poet claims he can make even the harshest critic fall in love with a slovenly woman:

But mawgre hem that blamen wommen most,
such is the force of myn impressyon,
that sodenly I felle can hir bost,
and al hir wrong ymagynacion;
yt shal not ben in her elleccion,
the foulest slutte of all a tovne refuse,
yf that my lyst for al that they can muse;

(Yet those who blame women the most, such is the force of my impressions, that suddenly I can cast down their boast, and all their wrong ideas; it shall not be in their power to choose, to reject the foulest slut in all the town, if it [is] my desire that it be all they can think about.)

But only ten years later, c. 1412, the same poet associates slut with prostitution. From Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes:

Demostenes his handës onës putte
In a wommannës bosom iapyyngly,
Of facë faire, but of hir body a slutte:
“With yow to delë,” seide he, “what schal I
Yow yeuë?” “xl pens,” quod sche, soothly.
He seydë nay, so dere he byë nolde
A thyng for which þat him repentë schulde.

(Demosthenes once playfully put his hands on a woman’s bosom, her face fair, but her body that of a slut; “To deal with you,” said he, “what shall I give you?” “Forty pence,” she said assuredly. He said no; so dear a thing he could not buy for which he would have to repent.)

Given that relatively few manuscripts from the period survive and that large gaps in the linguistic record are common, it is probably more accurate to say both senses of slut arose at about the same time, in the opening years of the fifteenth century.

The slovenly sense persisted in the language, but by the twentieth century it was largely overwhelmed by the sexual sense.

In the twenty-first century, we see slut starting to be reclaimed and the practice of criticizing women for exercising their sexual agency coming under fire. Slut-shaming was thus coined. The following post on Usenet from 16 April 2004 is the earliest example of slut-shaming found in the Oxford English Dictionary, although the word is not yet a compound, as the quotation marks denote. It’s a good example of the development of the word, even if the overall message expressed is a bit bonkers; not every teenager wants to engage in group sex:

Every teenager of both sexes secretly wants gangbangs, and the only boys who are afraid of them are those who are terrified that they will lose some solitary monogamous proprietary sexual access they wouldn't have because their penis is too small, or girls who have been brainwashed with the antisexual mindless “slut” shaming, or the lie that sexual giving leads to them being stuck with chidlren [sic] and no support, which is entirely only a political failure of the society.

And a few years later, on 22 September 2007, we see the verb to slut-shame emerge, again from Usenet:

Yeah. I so fucking hate moos who slut-shame other women and never once consider that men are perfectly capable of keeping their dicks in their pants when they want to.

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Sources:

Hoccleve, Thomas. “Litera Cupidinis.” In Hoccleve’s Works. I. The Minor Poems. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed. Early English Text Society, Extra Series 61. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892, lines 232–238, 82. Archive.org.

———. “The Regement of Princes.” In Hoccleve’s Works. III. The Regement of Princes. Frederick J. Furnivall, ed.  Early English Text Society, Extra Series 72. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1897, lines 3767–73, 136. Archive.org.

Middle English Dictionary, 4 March 2025, s.v. slutte, n.

Miz Daisy Cutter. “Re: FAB: WAH! Grandparents Ignore the G-kids.” Usenet: alt.support.childfree. 22 September 2007. https://groups.google.com/g/alt.support.childfree/c/zi3DaCOOkF4/m/eK09JYINNloJ

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2020, s.v. slut, n., slut, adj., slut, v., slut-shaming, n., slut-shame, v.

Walz, R. Steve. “Dogging, the Latest Craze in Europe, next YOUR BACK YARD!”  Usenet: alt.parenting.solutions, 16 April 2004.

Image credit: MGM, 1926. The Scarlet Letter, Victor Sjöström, dir. IMDB.com. Public domain image.

blaster

A blaster used by imperial stormtroopers in the Star Wars movie series

9 May 2025

Sometimes you find an antedating that is much earlier than you expected. Such is the case with blaster, the science fiction word for a ray gun.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates the science fiction use of blaster to 1950, with a first citation from an Isaac Asimov story, and I would have pegged that as about right for the era of the word’s invention. But this entry hasn’t been updated recently, and the word turns out to be another quarter century older. From Nictzin Dyalhis’s “When the Green Star Waned,” which appeared in the April 1925 issue of Weird Tales, in which a human encounters an alien life form and immediately kills it:

And here we found life, such at it was. I found it, and a wondrous start the ugly thing gave me! It was in semblance but a huge pulpy blob of a loathly blue color, in diameter over twice Hul Jok’s height, with gaping, triangular-shaped orifice for mouth, in which were set scarlet fangs; and that maw was in the center of the bloated body. At each corner of this mouth there glared malignant an oval, opaque, silvery eye.

Well it was for me that, in obedience to Hul Jok’s imperative command, I was holding my Blastor pointing ahead of me; for as I blundered full upon the monstrosity it upheaved its ugly bulk—how I do not know, for I saw no legs nor did it have wings—to one edge and would have flopped down upon me, but instinctively I slid forward the catch on the tiny Blastor, and the foul thing vanished—save for a few fragments of its edges—smitten into nothingness by the vibration hurled forth from that powerful little disintegrator.

It was the first time I had ever used one of the terrible instruments, and I was appalled at the instantaneous thoroughness of its workings.

The Blastor made no noise—it never does, nor do the big Ak-Blastors which are the fighting weapons used by the Aethir-Torps, when they are discharging annihilation—but that nauseous ugliness I had removed gave vent to a sort of bubbling hiss as it returned to its original atoms.

There are older uses of blaster in very different senses. It was used to refer to a trumpeter as early as the late sixteenth century, and Charles Cotton, in his 1664 translation of Paul Scarron’s mock-epic Virgile travesti, uses the word to refer to Boreas, the north wind:

And Sirrah, you there: Goodman Blaster,
Go tell that farting Fool your Master,
That such a whistling Scab, as he,
Was ne’er cut out to rule the Sea.

And the poet John Marston uses blaster in a metaphorical sense when he dedicates his 1598 book of satires, The Scourge of Villanie, to detraction (slander):

Foule canker of faire vertuous action,
Vile blaster of the freshest bloomes on earth,
Enuies abhorred childe, Detraction,
I heare expose, to thy all-taynting breath
The issue of my braine, snarle, raile, barke, bite,
Know that my spirit scornes Detractions spight.

By the eighteenth century, blaster was being used in connection with explosives, and in the twentieth the word moved into criminal slang, referring to safe-blowers, gunmen, and the guns themselves.

And by 1980, music could emanate from ghetto blasters, large portable radio/cassette players. From a review of Tom Wolfe’s 1980 book In Our Time that appeared in the Des Moines Register on 26 October of that year:

Having established his ground, he then devotes a paragraph to each thing in the ’70s that he thinks was significant: disco, Johnny Rotten, British soap operas, George McGovern, the move “The Great Gatsby,” Elvis Presley, Jonestown, designer jeans, box-office smashes, hand-held calculators, Alex Haley, Perrier water, light beer, Muhammad Ali, short hair, South Vietnam, Woody Allen, brain research, People magazine, Richard Nixon, ghetto-blaster radios and the New Left.

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Sources:

Cotton, Charles. “Scarronides: Or, Virgil Travestie” (1664). In The Genuine Poetical Works of Charles Cotton, Esq., fifth edition. London: T. Osborne, et al., 1765, 18. Gale Primary Sources: Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Dyalhis, Nictzin. “When the Green Star Waned.” Weird Tales, 5.4, April 1925, 3–12 and 183–91 at 6/2. Archive.org.

Eagar, Harry. “Skewering the ’70s.” Des Moines Register (Iowa), 26 October 1980, 4C/6. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d. (accessed 6 April 2025), s.v. blaster, n.1, blaster, n.2, ghetto, adj.

Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, 17 November 2024, s.v. blaster, n.

Marston, John. The Scourge of Villanie. Three Books of Satyres. London: James Roberts for John Buzbie, 1598, sig. A3. ProQuest: Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. blaster, n.

Prucher, Jeff, ed. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007, s.v. blaster, n.

Photo credit: JMC, 2010. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.