Pigs: Surprisingly Connected Etymologies
Channel: Alliterative
Date: 2022-08-16

Some piggy word origins.

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Transcript:
Today in Surprisingly Connected Etymologies we’re going hog wild!

A hog and a hyena may not seem all that similar to you, but apparently they did to the Greeks. Hog comes through the British Celtic *hukk-, from the Celtic expressive form *sukko-, from the Proto-Indo-European root *su- meaning “pig”, which itself may have simply been imitative of the sound of a pig. In addition to giving us words such as swine and sow, this root comes into Greek as hus “swine” also giving us the word hyena. Guess the Greeks could make a hyena out of a sow’s ear! 

Do you eat pork off of porcelain dishes? Etymologically you should! Porcelain comes from Italian porcellana which referred to a type of cowrie shell because the finish of the Chinaware was thought to resemble the lustrous surface of the shells. The shell’s name in turn comes from porcella “young sow (female pig)”, related to English pork, supposedly because the shape of the shell resembled the shape of the genitalia of the pigs. So it turns out that not only can you make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, but also a porcelain plate out of a sow’s….

Do you like back bacon? Well it’s etymologically redundant. Both the words back and bacon descend from Proto-Germanic *baka- meaning “back”. This becomes Frankish bako and Old French bacon, originally referring to “a side of pig meat (fresh or cured)”, and eventually narrowed to refer to “a side of cured pig meat” (otherwise known through Germanic lines as a flitch), before becoming the standard word for any cured pig meat.

War and wurst (as in bratwurst and liverwurst which are both typically made from pork) both come from the Proto-Indo-European root *wers- meaning “to confuse, mix up”. Wurst, which means “sausage” in German, comes from the idea of “mixture”, and war comes from the sense “to bring into confusion” and thus “strife”. This root also gives us the words worse and guerrilla. The phrase Sausage War is sometimes used to refer to an odd episode during the 1939-1949 Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland in which a Soviet attack was crucially delayed when the undernourished Red Army stopped to eat sausage soup left behind by Finnish cooks, allowing Finnish reinforcements to arrive.

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