The ground rules, from coffee to marriage

There’s a rude gesture in Pickwick that I don’t quite understand. Mr Jackson, a young lawyer’s clerk in conversation with Mr Pickwick, ‘applying his left thumb to the tip of his nose, worked a visionary coffee-mill with his right hand, thereby performing a very graceful piece of pantomime (then much in vogue, but now, unhappily, almost obsolete) which was familiarly denominated “taking a grinder”’. When I asked my husband he said, ‘Something sexual’, which I think unlikely.

I’d contemplated grinding while trying to find out whether coffee grounds are so called because they are ground-up coffee or because they are like earthy ground fallen to the bottom of the cup. There is an old joke: ‘Waiter, this coffee tastes like mud.’ ‘Well, sir, it was only ground this morning.’ I was surprised to find that the evidence is for coffee grounds taking their name from earthy ground; Thomas Macaulay mentioned grounds in a teacup, and tea isn’t ground.