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Aug 14, 06:57 PM: Bacon!
The following is an article from HERE!
The podictionary word for today is bacon: I had a moment of slight panic the other day. I was listening to an NPR podcast and this guy was talking about bacon and how it came from porkbellies. Now that in itself wouldn’t put most people into panic mode but you see I had just the day before sent the last and final corrections for my book back to the publisher. No more changes to be made.
And there in my book I mention in passing that the word bacon comes from the same Germanic source as the word back. So shouldn’t bacon itself come from the back of the pig? I rushed to the bookshelf and pulled out my Larousse Gastronomique. To my horror there is said “lean cured sides of pork” and went on to say
“The word derives from the Old French bakko, meaning “ham.” In French this became bacon meaning a piece of salt pork or even a whole pig. It was then adopted by the English and returned to France with its present meaning.”
The beads of sweat began to form on my forehead. I know I make mistakes, but I hate knowing. I clicked wikipedia.
“Pork bellies are the underside of the hog, from which bacon is made … in the United States in other parts of the world, bacon is more often made from back and side meats”
I cracked open Mark Morton’s Cupboard Love and read The term back bacon is redundant in that bacon derives from the old German bach, meaning “back.”
So that’s where I learned it. Could Mark be wrong? No, Mark is right. In fact everyone is right. What is normally called bacon in North America is from pork bellies. While in other places it is often loin. The word did come into English from French, but it got into French from German. I was surprised to see that the phrase saving one’s bacon goes as far back as 1654. To save your bacon means to save yourself from getting into trouble and I can see most of the path in the development of the word bacon in English to guess at how we got this idiom.
As Larousse said, bacon came from French and when it appears in English back in 1330 it meant salted meat from the back and sides of the pig. But over time people started using bacon to mean not only those cuts of meat but the entire carcass, as well as unsalted, fresh meat. To a very limited extent the word seems to have been applied to other flesh. There is a citation for whale blubber called bacon, I suppose due to the fat association.
The point is bacon had come to apply to an entire body, not just certain cuts. In parallel a new sense of bacon appeared—and it appears in Shakespeare in Henry IV—with a meaning of a country bumpkin. The idea here is that much of the population of rural England was sustained by eating pigs and just as French have been called frogs because they sometimes ate frogs’ legs, the hayseeds from the country were called bacon. So here we have the word bacon applying on the one hand to the full bodies of animals and on the other hand referring to actual people. It’s only a short hop to think that to save my bacon would mean to “save myself.”
