I saw the term used in a truck commercial recently and I realized that while I’ve heard about it all my life, I have no idea what pay dirt is. I mean in the original sense not as a metaphor for something valuable. What is pay dirt that makes it different from regular dirt? Is it a farming term? A mining term?
I think it’s a mining term.
It’s originally a mining (or at least prospecting) term. In particular the phrase often used is “hit pay dirt” as in finding the vein with valuable gold or whatever in it.
Mining term, according to Merriam Webster.
Possibly… and I am only speculating…
It is a mining term?
Or, I could make up that it comes from the practice of poor Greek patriarchs paying their help with dirt when the crops failed. This is the technique called folk etymology.
I always thought it was oil related. As in, they just drilled through some dirt and found an ocean of wealth under it.
Of course, I heard somewhere (might have been here) that it’s a mining term
So the dirt itself has no value? The value is because there are trace amounts of precious metals mixed in with the dirt? If so, then hitting pay dirt seems a strange metaphor for finding something of value. What you’re actually implying is that you struck gold - all you have to do is get rid of that pile of useless dirt.
Well, that’s generally true of mining, but especially true of mining for a valuable metal like gold. A gold deposit that’s worth exploiting – i.e., that will give you higher value in gold extracted than it costs to extract the gold – will mostly be “dirt”, and only a small part will be gold.
There is a subtle difference in the implications. Striking gold implies an immediate payoff. Striking pay dirt implies that your efforts are starting to become successful. People swap the expressions, but there is a difference.
Exactly. It’s the difference between a farmer saying he’s got a field full of corn and saying he’s got a field full of stalks. Technically he’s got both but in reality he’s going to be thinking about the part that’s valuable.
Also, there’s dirt, which is worthless, and there’s pay dirt, which is literally gold. It’s not dirt at all, it’s pay dirt. Just like eye candy isn’t candy. It’s a compound expression, and dirt is not to be parsed separately to mean “brown stuff that the ground is made of” at all.
No, that’s not folk etymology, it’s an etymological urban legend (if it caught on).
Folk etymology means that an unfamiliar word is altered to match a more familiar word. One clear example is “turtle.” The word for the reptile came from the French “tortue,” which was altered to the already existing “turtle” – the name of a bird. Eventually, to differentiate, the avian turtle was called a turtledove. Others of similar form include “haberdasher” and “isinglass.”
It is a common and pretty understandable mistake.
Pay dirt certainly is dirt in the ordinary sense. It’s not gold; it’s dirt whcih contains a sufficient concentration of gold (or some other valuable mineral) to make it profitable to process the dirt to extract the valuable minerals within.
Precisely. This is being overthought a bit – it is soil (usually alluvial, whether current or in a sedimentary deposit laid down alluvially) which contains enough of one or more valuable minerals or ores to make it profitable to process – “dirt which pays (off, to process),” just as UDS says. One digs through unprofitable soil in an effort to “hit pay dirt”, in both literal and figurative senses.
Added: As Silenus notes, in hard-rock mining, one “strikes gold” – a vein of rock in which gold has been concentrated, as a native-element mineral. “Pay dirt,” on the other hand, is from placer mining – the mining of unconsolidated sediments where gold or another mineral, having been eroded out of the “mother lode” (vein of gold that one might strike), has been concentrated by the action of sediment, as in sediments laid down at a bend in a river, or in deposits on the former course of a river.
And a field full of dirt.
Shoot, at Lambeau Field, they sometimes sell the sod. (And people buy it, sadly.) I guess that is literally pay dirt.
Didn’t Duran Duran have a song about mining terms?
Once. In the 1960s. For about 20 minutes.