the.com/breeding
What you do with animals, plants, or your manners, depending on who's judging.
means The upbringing, manners, and social polish someone displays — or, in the literal sense, the controlled mating of animals or plants to produce offspring with particular traits.
from From Old English 'bredan,' meaning to nurture or keep warm — related to 'brood,' as in a hen brooding over eggs. The word stayed close to its nest-warming roots for centuries, meaning 'to bring young into being,' before it hatched a second life in the 1500s-1600s as a term for good upbringing — the idea being that a person of 'good breeding' had been raised and cultivated as carefully as prize livestock, which tells you exactly what the aristocracy thought of itself.
- double meaning
- Victorians used breeding to mean class, not genetics
- selective breeding
- Turned wolves into pugs in roughly 15,000 years
- corn's secret
- Modern corn barely resembles its wild teosinte ancestor
- insult origin
- No breeding meant bad manners, not bad parents