High-grading, or stealing choice bits of something, is mentioned in a book by David G. Rasmussen called The Man Who Moiled For Gold. Moil itself is an interesting term, meaning “to become wet and muddy from work.” It comes from the Latin word mollis, meaning “soft,” which is also the source of our word mollify. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Moil Means to Get Wet and Muddy from Hard Work”
We were talking earlier about high grading, that is, taking out the best of something, like the best of M&Ms, and it coming from mining and taking the best gold ore out of a mine.
There are a lot of stories about this in a book I ran across called The Man Who Moiled for Gold.
Moiled?
Yeah, I had to go look up moiled. What is moiled? M-O-I-L-E-D, moiled.
To moil is to become wet and muddy from work. You’re working so hard that you’re just becoming sweaty. And then the dust is sticking to your body.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah, it comes from a Latin word that means to wet or moisten or soften. It’s related to mollify, for example, to soften. So moil.
And since the 16th century, people have talked about toil and moil, meaning a day’s work. Going off to my toil and moil.
You could actually put gold dust in the dirt on your body and wash it off into the drain at home and be a millionaire.
Good idea.
Why don’t we do that?
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I just listed to the podcast where you mentioned “moiling.” I first heard the word when I was in high school. My dad introduced me to Robert Service’s poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” It starts:
“There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold; …”
You can even hear Scott Simon and Daniel Pinkwater read it on NPR here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5672398