We eat chicken and fish, but not cow. Instead, we use terms like veal, beef, mutton, and pork to refer to red meat. It’s largely the result of the Norman invasion of the British Isles, when French started to meld with English. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Beef vs. Cow”
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Tudie Owens from Dallas, Texas.
Well, I’ve had wondering about, I call it cow versus chicken. And, you know, when we have dinner, we’ll say, oh, we’re having chicken for dinner. But when we have steak or hamburger, we don’t say we’re having cow. Or if we’re having pork chops, we don’t say we’re having pig for dinner. And it’s silly, but I was just wondering why.
Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah, it’s a good question. It goes back to something that happened a long time ago in 1066. You might remember that the Normans, the French-speaking Normans, invaded the British Isles, the Norman invasion. And with that marriage of cultures also came a marriage of language. So you had these two cultures operating in the same space with their own lexicons. And there’s a strange thing that happens when you have two approximate, almost perfect synonyms for a thing. Either one of them gets forced out or they start to diverge in meaning.
And so what happened is that the French terms for things that had to do with the kitchen and the table and government and the judiciary and just the managing of people overall, because they were the dominating class, those tended to stick and take on the words that we use now for the food terms. Like veal comes from the French and mutton also comes from the French and so on. And beef comes from the French and pork comes from the French and a few others like that. The word government and legislature and lieutenant, all of these words come from the French.
But the process wasn’t quick. It took something like three or four hundred years for it to happen. Even by Chaucer’s time, which was well after that, they had not yet perfectly solidified into their current roles as we use them today. You could still, even at that time, and even a couple hundred years after that, still talk about, I’m going to go round up the beef or something like that. The terms were more interchangeable in the past than they are now.
Okay. Yeah. It’s crazy. There’s a slight myth that says, oh, the reason that we have these terms is because the French, through their cultural domination, stomped all over the Anglo-Saxon language and those terms were obliterated. But I don’t think you can call a four to 600 year process a stomping out. I think what you can call that is it just terms that continued to be used in a consistent daily way were the ones that won out in a particular domain. It’s interesting too psychologically, isn’t it? That eating beef feels different from eating dead cow.
Yeah, it’s sort of like the whole process of we don’t really know where those things come from. We’re blind to that. And the best example of that is that eating escargot seems kind of elite and sophisticated, but eating snails is disgusting.
I know. Some people would argue that about cows and pigs, too.
That’s true, yeah. Thank you so much. This goes back to 1056.
1066.
1066. Yeah, if you Google that, Google 1066-1066, English, Norman, French, you’re going to get some great stuff that’s been written on this. It’s one of those topics that is just rich in history, and you kind of have a lot of aha moments. You’re like, oh, I get it now, and maybe what you read of Chaucer in college is coming back to. It’s pretty interesting stuff.
Oh, very good. Well, thank you so much.
Sure thing, Judy. Thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
Okay, bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
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