Every day’s a school day, as the saying goes, and it’s a wonderful privilege of being alive that you’re never too old to learn. Facts that seem obvious to some people from a young age can evade others until much later in life.
For example, I must have been in my 40s before I learned that if you start one key to the right when touch typing, it all comes out in Welsh.
I was 50 by the time it dawned on me that soil is made up of mineral particles mixed with decomposed animal and plant life. All those leaves that fall, all those microscopic creatures that die, all those birds and squirrels and cows that… I guess I fell asleep during that geography lesson. Or was it biology? Who knows! Maybe I slept through the whole term.
I’d always thought of soil as, well, soil – just another substance that made up the earth: you know, vegetable, mineral and mud. I’d made pies out of it. I’d planted seeds in it. I’d done sliding tackles through it. I’d never stopped to think what it actually was. Well, why would you?
(Why am I envisaging you shaking your heads in disbelief and thinking, “What a div!” Probably because you are. OK, so let me channel my inner Suzy Dent.)
The word ‘soil’ is rooted deep in the English language, as far back as the 13th century, when it was adopted from the French ‘soillier’, which meant to splatter with mud. Fancy having a word for that! And trust the French for inventing it. In a move redolent of the “I fart in your general direction” scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, you can imagine the French taunting their English counterparts with, “Je vais te soillier, you son of a silly person!” The world would be a better place if territorial disputes were settled this way.
The English, being more po-faced, used the verb to mean ‘to defile’, as in ‘sully’, which comes from the same French word and is still commonly, and almost exclusively, still used today in conjunction with ‘reputation’. We also ‘soile’ to mean a muddy place, a bog, and so it was only a matter of time before it came to mean excrement.
Everything errs that way in the end.
These days it serves as a rather genteel option. We say ‘soil pipe’, ‘night soil’ and ‘he’s gone and soiled himself again, Mrs Drinkwater’, in preference to the many other synonyms available to us. And if that’s put you off your Friday afternoon tea, I apologise, but let’s be honest: how do you think that tea grew in the first place?
Blows your mind, doesn’t it?
