the.com/fodder
the raw material that exists only to be consumed, conquered, or fed into something hungrier.
means Coarse food given to livestock — and by extension, any raw stuff supplied in bulk to be used up, whether by animals, machines, or appetites.
from From Old English 'fodor,' meaning food or nourishment for cattle, drawn from the same Germanic root that gives us 'food' and 'feed' — all cousins descended from a Proto-Germanic word for feeding. For most of its life it meant literal hay and grain heaped before animals. The grimmer figurative sense, 'cannon fodder,' came later, casting soldiers as bulk material shoveled into the maw of war — the same logic that lets us speak of 'fodder for gossip' or 'tabloid fodder' today.
- latin root
- From 'foddre,' Old English for animal feed.
- cannon fodder
- Soldiers treated as expendable, coined around 1891.
- silage trick
- Fermented fodder feeds livestock through barren winters.
- modern slang
- Means anyone or anything easily exploited for gain.
- tabloid fuel
- Scandal becomes fodder the moment it sells papers.