Meat processing

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 ».