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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Somewhere just under my radar I’ve been vaguely aware that “Bread is the staff of life” and “Bread is the stuff of life” both get said.
“The staff of life” : Well, it seems to mean “The main support” though it looks very like a word meaning “loaf” in the Bible
When I shall send on them the evil arrows of famine, which shall be for their destruction, and which I will send to destroy you: and I will increase the famine on you, and will break your staff of bread
Son of man, behold, I will break the staff of bread in Jerusalem: and they shall eat bread by weight,
Merriam-Webster has it dating back to 1638, which I take to be the King James Bible and so the same as the two quotes from Ezekiel, above.
As for “The stuff of”, well “The stuff of dreams” seems to be a slight misquote from “The Tempest”
We are such stuff As dreams are made on
but “The stuff of life” googles very satisfactorily in connection with bread.
(It has just dawned on me that “staves” is the plural of “staff”)
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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First noted by Ken Lakritz in 2005: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/contribute … mment-4143
The relevant idiom in the Hebrew Scriptures is “break the staff of bread,” where it is used about a half dozen times. The Biblical idiom employs the usual word for a rod/staff (מַטֶּה, deriving from a word for stretching out, branching—Charlton Hesston, when he did all those miracles in The Ten Commandments, was brandishing a מַטֶּה.). The idiom seems to say that bread is a staple, a crutch on which people rely, and that the absence of bread is like having a walking staff break and pitch you to the ground.
The 1638 M-W reference is to the first OED citation for “staff of life,” where it is a metaphor for bread. Other OED quotations show the phrase being applied to maize, barley, and beans. The English idiom, when applied to bread, seems to be a creative reworking of the Biblical idiom. The application to non-bread foodstuffs is an extraction of part of the idiom. The sequence seems to be “break the staff of bread” >> “bread is the staff of life” >> “X is the staff of life.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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