Although no longer associated with the kitchen, the word garble was originally a culinary term. When it first appeared in English in the late sixteenth century, garble referred to the refuse or chaff left over after spices had been sifted: when you garbled something, you were separating the usable from the unusable. By the late seventeenth century, however, this sense of dividing the good from the bad had come to be associated with deception: a farmer might “garble” a sample of his grain so that it would seem to have fewer weed seeds than it really did. From here, garble easily shifted from meaning to sift deceptively to currently meaning to mix up or to confuse an issue. In origin, the word garble is Latin: cribellare, meaning to sift, was adopted by Arabic as gharbala, which then entered Italian as garbellare before being adopted by English as garble. Incidentally, the original source of garble (the Latin cribellare) derived from an even older Latin word\u2014cernere, meaning to separate\u2014which is the source of the English discern. Two words, therefore, that are now almost opposites\u2014garble, meaning to mix up, and discern, meaning to tell apart\u2014evolved from exactly the same source.<\/p>\n
Rummaging through and cleaning out herbs; sorting.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Although no longer associated with the kitchen, the word garble was originally a culinary term. When it first appeared in English in the late sixteenth century, garble referred to the refuse or chaff left over after spices had been sifted: when you garbled something, you were separating the usable from the unusable. By the late […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-g"],"yoast_head":"\n