[lit-ideas] Splat a Pike

  • From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2010 09:10:55 EDT

From today's World Wide Words, ed. M.  Quinion:

"Under the heading of "Terms of a Keruer" (in a 1508 book, The  Boke of 
Keruying) appeared a long list of the terms for carving any type of  flesh, 
fowl or fish.
The attentive reader (who was intended to be the master  of a big 
household, not a presumably illiterate servant) was instructed that one  should 

break a deer, 
disfigure a peacock, 
dismember a heron,  
lift a swan, 
unjoint a bittern, 
unbrace a mallard, 
thigh a  pigeon, 
splat a pike, 
scull a tench and 
culpon a trout. 

But  never, never 
carve. 

All this reminds one a little of the long lists  of collective 
terms for birds:

murmuration of starlings,  
unkindness of ravens, 
tiding of magpies, 
exaltation of larks --  

which were first listed in 
The Book of St Albans of  1486.

Speranza,
The Swimming-Pool Library
Bordighera

-------  "We are bewitched by language --" Witters.  

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