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ОглавлениеTHE DEVELOPMENT OF the word ‘bacon’ seems to have been something of a shared project for Europe. The word exists in English, French, German, Dutch and Norwegian. The road has been bumpy, but today we all agree that the word is bacon.
If you entered an inn 1,000 years ago and ordered bacon and eggs, you certainly wouldn’t have been served bacon and eggs. Eggs wouldn’t have been a problem, but less certain is what they would have accompanied. Perhaps a steak?
There seems to be general agreement among people who’ve tried to write the history of bacon that the word can be traced to Old German, where we find the word ‘bak’. This evolved into the High German ‘bakko’ (which can be spelled in numerous ways, including ‘bacho’), which can mean either belly or bacon.
The word also appeared in the Netherlands as ‘baken’ and we know that the French were talking about bacon before the 1600s. In the German vernacular, this would eventually develop into ‘bakkon’, the equivalent of the English ‘back’ and the Norwegian ‘bak’. So far, so straightforward. Bacon must be about the back. Of a pig. Right?
The only problem here is that bacon is not, in fact, always made using meat from the back. ‘Bak’ on a pig can mean one of two things – either the back, or the gammon. This presents us with a problem, because bacon can actually come from the belly – that is the front and the bottom.
In England, back bacon generally refers to the thin rashers of meat carved from the loin at the back of the pig, which makes everything fairly straightforward. But in the USA and Scandinavia bacon comes from the side or belly of the animal, making ‘streaky bacon’. This doesn’t have much to do with the back. So, what’s going on?
When the word bacon entered the English language in the 1100s (from French) it was used in more or less the same way as ‘flitch’, referring to the salted sides of pork. A few centuries later, the word bacon was generally used for salted pork. There was even a somewhat confusing period when bacon was also used to describe pork in general. This practice lasted until well into the 1800s.
As the years have passed, everyone has thankfully come to general agreement about the meaning of ‘bacon’. That is to say, everyone in England. And everyone in the USA. Unfortunately, there’s still plenty of confusion between the two.
It was only with the development of modern industry and the need for standardisation that two different types of bacon developed. There is, however, no doubt that the whole thing started in England.
Etymology
ETYMOLOGY IS THE STUDY of the origins of words. The vocabularies of modern languages come from a variety of different sources: some have evolved from older words, others have been borrowed from foreign languages and some have been named from people, developed from initialisms, or even have been deliberately invented by a certain author.
SOURCE: WIKTIONARY.ORG
