Mill : nm Un mill is a device used to crush, grind the grain of cereals; establishment that uses these devices.
(word from latin molinium, grindstone "Grinding wheel")
Machine, engine.
Have a spinning mill / s: have one / more sources of income that bring in.
Automobile, airplane engine. Spin, snore his mill.
Word mill: person who talks nonstop (talkative).
Locutions: We cannot be both in the oven and in the mill: we cannot be everywhere at the same time.
Fighting against windmills: against imaginary enemies (alluding to an episode of Don Quixote by Cervantes.
Bring water to someone's mill: provide them with resources; unwittingly give him arguments in a debate.
We enter this house as in a mill, as we want.
Any source of cash flow
Coffee grinder: juicy business.
Mill: receiver's shop.
Coffee mill: barrel organ, which seems to grind tunes.
Windmill: the back.
In prostitution jargon, the mill is above all the girl who works (turns) the best.
Coffee grinder: Machine gun (hairy slang, soldier of the First World War) and by analogy to the sound of the rotary coffee grinder.
Windmill: In the local language, a uniformed police officer in charge of traffic.
Coffee grinder: machine gun.
Go to the coffee grinder: endure police brutality.
- The expression "Throwing your hat over the mills": Recognizing that you are incapable of solving a difficulty - Giving the cat your tongue - Stopping in a story, because we do not know the rest - Acting freely without to care about public opinion, to defy decorum.
Here is an expression which dates from the XVIIth century and which had several meanings. But all indicate some form of renunciation, sometimes forced. The idea generally evoked, even if the plural remains an enigma, is that the windmills were usually built on heights, and that to throw his cap over the mills, it was therefore to send it really very high therefore very away, thus indicating the extent of the renunciation. the end. According to the French author and grammarian Pierre-Marie Quitard (1792-1882), this would come from the end of fairy tales told to children, which often ended with a "I threw my cap over the mills, I don't know what all this became ", a way of saying that the possible continuation of the adventures thus told is another story. The last meaning, more recent, applies to the one who acts while not caring what on, the one who frees himself from constraints, and more specifically to young girls who shamelessly get to know the wolf, sending their good behavior to graze far over the mills.
- The expression "Not being able to be (at the same time) in the oven and in the mill": Not being able to be everywhere at the same time - Not being able to do several things at the same time.
This expression is attested at the beginning of the XNUMXth century.
It comes from feudal law, when peasants or vassals who wanted to grind their grain and leather their bread were required to use the common mill and oven provided by the overlord, for a fee (just as they had to use his wine press to obtain their wine).
The two tasks being necessarily carried out one after the other, it was not possible to be at the same time in the mill and in the oven (one said besides at the mill et in the oven, everyone takes their turn).
- The expression "A word mill": A very talkative person.
There is the mill which is named after what is grinded there, such as the wheat mill, etc. and the one named after what it produces such as the oil mill, for example.
And our chatterbox is unquestionably in the second category, the talkative person producing, by his incessant chatter, an inexhaustible quantity of words.
This expression, with its current meaning, comes to us from the second half of the XNUMXth century. The mill symbolizes the mechanism which turns without stopping, driven by the wind or the water.
But a century before, it already existed. Indeed, it first designated the tongue, this organ which constantly agitates in the mouth of one who does not know how to be silent.
It is by metonymy that the one whose "word mill" functions without stopping has himself become "a word mill".