Meat processing in Portuguese

The seventeenth entry is as miudezas, and the two languages named the same tray of goods after two different facts about it. Portuguese named them by size: miúdo is small, so these are the small parts, the ones left over when the big ones have names of their own. English named them by where they ended up. « Offal » is « off » and « fall » welded together — the stuff that falls off the block while a carcass is being broken down — and the neighbouring Germanic languages built the identical compound, Middle Dutch afval beside it. Nothing in the word says small, or edible, or even animal, which is why « offal » is still used of the waste of a mill or a mine. Two English habits follow from that. The trade keeps separate names for particular bundles of the same goods, so « the pluck » is heart, liver and lungs taken together and sold as one thing. And a dead word survives inside a live phrase: « umbles », the entrails of a deer, made the « umble pie » that later generations heard as « humble pie ».