Hunting and game

La venaison and « venison » are the same word, and what separates them is a narrowing that happened on the English side only. Both go back to Latin venatio, which did not mean meat at all: it meant the hunting, the chase, and then what the chase brought home. French kept the wider sense. La venaison is the flesh of any large game — the boar of this list quite as readily as the red deer — and it belongs to the trade, chalked on a board at a farm gate beside la carcasse and la chambre froide à gibier. « Venison » came into English with the same breadth and then lost it: in modern use it means deer and nothing else, and a butcher offering boar as venison would be corrected. So the two are not false friends in the ordinary way, since neither has gone anywhere strange; one stayed where it was while the other contracted. The consequence runs one way only. Reading French, do not assume deer. Writing it, do not reach for la venaison when a hare is meant: this is the meat of large game, and a hare is not that.