Piepowder, are you?

Learning new words is always exciting, especially when their meanings are interesting. Take, for instance, the word ‘piepowder‘. Now, what would you think that means? Powdered pie? Uh-huh, wrong. It comes from the old French ‘pie’ meaning foot, and ‘poudre’, meaning powder or dust. Basically, when you put foot and powder together, you are referring to the dust on your feet. In English, piepowder has come to mean a traveller, especially a travelling merchant, says word expert Anu Garg. He says that in the pre-sneaker, pre- sidewalk, carriage-less era, travellers earned their name the hard way, one dusty footstep at a time. Merchants would trudge from fair to fair, handling disputes as well.

Pilgrimages to sacred destinations and places of worship were undertaken on foot in earlier times as there was no other option; all pilgrims were piepowders. Even today, some devotees take a vow to trek barefoot, say, to Vaishno Devi, to Mumbai’s Siddhivinayak mandir and to Kerala’s Sabarimalai. Pilgrims to Sabarimalai chant ‘Kallum Mullum Kaalukku Methai’ – ‘stones and thorns are but soft cushions to our feet’ – but the mother of all walking pilgrimages is the Camino de Santiago (The Way of St James) in Spain. The journey itself is said to be a transformative experience, taking one to exalted spiritual heights, revealing deep insights. Interestingly, the Spanish name for the Milky Way is El Camino de Santiago – a medieval legend says that the Milky Way was formed from the dust raised by travelling pilgrims!

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