It starts off as pig food and ends up as the finest quality of man.
How?
Like this.
In the 1600s smeddum described the most annoyingly floaty particles of flour which, after grinding, evaded the sacks and ended up on the floor to be swept up for pig food.
As time went on smeddum came to refer to any very fine powder (the word is still sometimes used to describe powdered malt) including a particularly nasty mercury-based powder used as an insecticide*. This insecticide was such powerfully noxious stuff that the word smeddum soon came to mean the strength, or the essential character of a substance.
Not long after that smeddum began, as it does now, to be used in Scotland to mean vigour, courage, energy, common sense and resourcefulness.
It's something to which any of us might aspire.
And it all comes from the dirty sweepings of the mill floor.
Word To Use Today: smeddum. This word comes from the Anglo-Saxon word smeodoma which means fine flour.
*Quite possibly dimethylmercury, H3C-Hg-CH3, which is such nasty stuff that it's been known to kill someone from a single exposure through latex gloves.
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