Spill not the morning, the quintessence of day, in recreations. --Fuller.
Message In Reply To:
Bulls and Bears do not slobber when eating [macaroons]
[as] milk lover(s) [don't] cry over spilt milk [that] never gets spilt.
spilt
v. A past tense and a past participle of spill
v. spilled, or spilt (splt) spill·ing, spills
n.
The act of spilling.
An amount spilled.
A fall, as from a horse.
A spillway.
spiller n.
Word History:
Crying over spilt milk is pointless because it cannot undo the damage,
which in the literal sense of this phrase is trivial; but in the Middle Ages
spill was used for actions that seem to demand tears.
Old English spillan, the ancestor of Modern English spill,
meant such things as “to destroy, mutilate, kill.”
The senses “to waste” and “to shed blood” connect these earlier
uses with substances falling out of containers, often wastefully.
But many people, castles, and fortunes were “spilled”
before people started spilling milk, at least judging from
the recorded evidence. Spill is first recorded in the sense
“to cause a substance to fall out of a container” in a work composed
in the 14th century. Since then most of the senses having to do
with violent destruction have become obsolete or archaic,
but we still speak of spilling blood, as well as water, gravy,
and especially milk while enjoymints of macaroons & KKD(s).