one of those questions that on 2009-2015 twitter probably would have rustled up an expert: what is the history of referring to certain materials as "humble"? reading a book on commodities where the ~humility~ of various minerals gets invoked a lot, curious when/how that language became commonplace. Is it a Bible thing? Feels like maybe a Bible thing
IMO sand is NOT humble though, have you ever been to a beach sand loves to get into EVERYONE'S business and also clothes
Until an expert —maybe an OED question? I can check if no one turns up. @ingrid
@ingrid I don’t recognise anything biblical about it, but I’m always happy to be proven wrong.
@ingrid is it alchemical, like base and noble metals?
@fgregg oooh that's an interesting possibility!
@ingrid a quick King James Bible search suggests no. Lots of “humble” but no attribution of it to things, let alone specific ones
@ingrid new sense of "humble bundle" just dropped.
@ingrid “humilis” is also a Latin word for a “low” rhetorical style, associated with the homily (itself also sometimes called in English a humble) — so “the humble mustard seed” might also be taken to mean something like “the proverbial mustard seed”
@ingrid this sense of “sermo humilis” is usually attributed to Cicero, but St Augustine and the church fathers went nuts with it https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780198662778.001.0001/acref-9780198662778-e-4305
Etymology suggests that humble as a word traces back to "lowly" as in literally "on the ground" (the same origin as the word humus), so it may have begun as an explicit statement of how materials like sand and salt are literally "of the earth"