"When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie,
My grace, all-sufficient, shall be thy supply.
The flames shall not hurt thee; I only design
Thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine."
Historians remain uncertain of the writer of these lines, but usually the credit goes to an 18th-century Baptist layman in London, Robert Keen, writing in the late 1700s. This was in the midst of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, especially during the years when blast furnaces turned base metals into iron and turned England into a world power. Keen, or whoever wrote this hymn, was apparently familiar with the metallurgical process that left the useless waste--the dross--on top of the liquid metal.
The English word dross, which appears in several places in the King James translation of the Bible (e.g., Ezekiel 22; Proverbs 25) is a translation of the Hebrew word seeg, which refers to a turning back or a turning away (by inference, meaning unwanted or waste). The earliest use of this English word occurs around 1050 CE, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
Floss, according to the OED, has been around since about the 15th century in French and about the 18th century in English. It refers most often to silk strands. A New Orleans dentist, Levi Spear Parmly, is credited with inventing dental floss and encouraging flossing of teeth in the early 1800s. The practice of flossing gained popularity around the time of WWII when nylon replaced silk as the major flossing material.
One might say the purpose of floss it to remove the dross from teeth; it is, thus, a refining tool.
What's this mean to me? Good writers (and editors), I think, are excellent at word flossing. They are very good, too, at flossing the memory. The task of a good editor surely is "thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine."
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