pork

• the flesh of a pig, used as food

From Latin porcus, pig

The word pork comes to us from the Norman conquest.

In a famous passage from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Wamba, the jester, tells the pig-keeper, Gurth, that his herd will be converted into Normans before morning:

• "The swine turned Normans to my comfort!" quoth Gurth, "expound that to me Wamba, for my brain is too dull and my mind too vexed to read riddles."
• "Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on four legs?" demanded Wamba.
• "Swine, fool — swine," said the herd; "every fool knows that."
• "And swine is good Saxon," said the jester, "but how call you the sow when she is flayed and drawn and quartered, and hung up by the heels like a traitor?’
• "Pork," answered the swineherd.
• "I am glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I think, is good Norman French. And so, when the brute lives and is in charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name, but becomes a Norman and is called pork when she is carried to the castlehall to feast among the nobles..."

And what of the other animals kept for the table? Anglo-Saxon on the hoof, but Norman on the platter:

• cow, oxen, kine > beef
• calf > veal
• deer > venison
• sheep > mutton
• fowl > poultry

The root *porko- properly means "young pig" and has among its derivatives: porcupine (porco- + spina, thorn), porcelain (from its resemblance to a young sow’s back), porpoise (porco + piscis, fish), aardvark (Dutch "earth-pig"), and the Old English farrow (a litter of pigs). The English swine has its Latin cognate too in sus, pig, which is the origin of soil (to dirty) and its Greek cognate hus, the source of hyena.

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