The daily grind

Coffee shops may have a daily grind, but it's not the same as the daily grind.
Unfortunately, the idiom version of the daily grind does not refer to freshly ground coffee.

YouTube / iTunes / Spotify / Radio Public / Pocket Casts / Google Podcasts / Breaker / Overcast

Listen to ArtisanEnglish.jp posts & lesson intros here.



Idiom: The daily grind

It’s the first of April!

YAY!

Spring is in the air, and that means that many newly graduated university students will be starting their new jobs.

Let me be one of the first to welcome them to the daily grind.

That’s right, the first month or so will be very exciting.

After that a few years, things will start to get tedious.

Then, before you know it, you’ll be well into the daily routine of getting up in the morning, taking the train, and working until the end of the day.

Doesn’t it sound wonderful?

As far as I know, the term daily grind refers to the regular job that women had of using two stones to grind wheat into flour to make bread.

It appears that the daily grind took a few hours each day and was very tedious.


Therefore, we still use the term today to refer to tedious, everyday work.


Imagine doing that every day.

In English, we have an expression that is the best thing since sliced bread.

Perhaps it should be changed to the best thing since machine-ground flour.

I bet people were delighted when machine-ground flour was invented.


This post is simple and easy to read.

It’s likely to be understood by someone with at least a 6th-grade education (age 11). 

On the Flesch-Kincaid reading-ease test, this post scores 81.  

The easier a passage is to read, the higher the score on a scale of 0 – 100.