Mint

Mint: verb. As opposed to referencing the commonly used meaning of the verb mint, today's post is about the less frequent version, which is (according to professional linguists) extinct in the wild and kept alive only in the fat books sitting somewhere in the compartment of the Oxford English Dictionary dedicated to dead words (there is some controversy, however, regarding labeling these words as dead. Some philosophers have argued that words kept alive only in old dictionaries are not really dead but on life support, since they may come back to life at any time. Others maintain that these words are actually brain-dead and if they ever start being used again, they are no more than philosophical zombies). Therefore, to the meaning of the word: to mint, in a gardening context, is the same thing as to weed (only with mint of course), the word functioning both as a noun and as a verb. Since mint is a very invasive plant, this expression used to be quite common. So common, in fact, that mint started to be regarded as a normal weed and people started to refer to minting simply as weeding.