You can tell someone’s an A Way with Words listener when they confess to lying awake at night wondering about questions like, “Are the words fillet and flay etymologically related?” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Fillet and Flay”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Jack. I’m calling from Madison, Wisconsin.
I had a question, one of those things that occurs to you in the gray area between sleep and waking up when you’re waking up in the morning.
Oh, yeah.
I was wondering, the idea occurred to me, the similarities between the verb filet, F-L-A-Y, and the noun filet, as in a filet mignon.
I wondered whether those two words shared some kind of original word, or whether something got carried over in a translation or something like that.
No, the short answer is no.
They’re etymologically distinct,
And I think it’s mostly, maybe completely,
A coincidence that they are spelled similarly,
Sound similar, and can, on occasion,
Describe similar acts.
The filet, F-I-L-E-T,
I know some people pronounce it fillet,
Comes from an old French word meaning thread,
Which itself is based on a Latin word, film,
F-I-L-U-M, which is the same place that we get the word filament.
So that’s filay.
And then flay, F-L-A-Y, comes from the Old English flayen,
Which is Germanic and not from Latin.
And it’s got roots in a variety of Germanic languages.
And so ultimately these two have separate roots.
There is something, a kind of cross-pollination that happens sometimes in English
Where two similar words, I should say where they sound similar or spelled similarly,
Sometimes we’ll lend or reinforce certain meanings in other words.
It’s possible that it happened here that filet and flay, you know, one can mean take the skin off
And the other one can mean to cut into very thin slices.
It’s possible that they’ve reinforced each other, but I don’t see any evidence of it.
No common ancestry, just pure coincidence.
Right.
But you know what?
I’m digging the fact that this is what you were thinking about at night before you go to bed.
Me too.
Kindred soul, definitely.
Yeah.
All right.
Sweet dreams.
Take care of yourself.
Bye-bye.
Thanks.
Bye-bye.
Bye now.
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