Separate wheat from chaff

Usage examples of winnowing.

On the one day in a hundred that the mists parted, the primitives had sunned themselves on these rocky outcroppings, unlike the primitives on the previous world, unlike its own creators, who, until the Winnowing, were unable ever to leave the supporting water even for brief moments.

Now came the terrifying hour of First Winnowing, which I dreaded more than death itself.

Because I was young and ignorant, I thought of First Winnowing as a process controlled by sheer whim and impulse, or even by private grudge, and therefore one that took no account of the merit that I was certain I possessed.

I wondered now: Was my surviving the Winnowing really something to be proud of, or was it merely the sign of how willing the village was to dispense with me?

The tenth of Orgulet came round again, and another Winnowing was held.

This time the tenth of Orgulet saw no new Winnowing: it would have been too cruel to dismiss any of us at this point.

We were doing our own Winnowing now, our numbers reduced daily by weariness or illness or fear or simple bad luck.

Seventy was a critical number: it brought on the Final Winnowing, the Silent Winnowing, when the actual Forty would be chosen.

The curious thing about this last Winnowing was that there was no tap: thirty were to be eliminated, but they would not be told.

When that day came, it would return, bringing with it the message that they were no longer alone in a universe that seemed to favor only the scurrying mites that had, before the Winnowing, dominated the waterless areas of their own planet.

The unremembered incident had involved spacegoing mites, not unlike those it had encountered on tens of thousands of worlds, not unlike those who had, before the Winnowing, infested the land areas of the world of its creators.

A glance at the dirt-caked people working the winnowing baskets sent them back to dig out their small bags of oatmeal and ground acorn.

The winnowing out will be done precisely where overpopulation and hopelessness are worst and enough will be left to preserve each nation, each ethnic group, each culture.

So when they held the Winnowings, I was always passed over, because the Masters knew that I had been chosen in advance to be a Pilgrim.

This consisted of making a first reading of all those letters and cards of mysterious authorship and often unintelligible purpose that senior officers, for whose eyes are reserved only the least whacky winnowings, are pleased to call “communications from members of the public”.