Carving Verbs

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A dinner host in the 17th century might have wished for a usage manual — a different term was used for carving each dish, and, according to Samuel Orchart Beeton, “for a person to use wrong terms in relation to carving was an unpardonable affront to etiquette.” One might:

  • allay a pheasant
  • barb a lobster
  • break a hare
  • chine a salmon
  • culpon a trout
  • disfigure a peacock
  • dismember a hen
  • display a quail
  • fin a chevin
  • fract a chicken
  • frush a chub
  • gobbet a trout
  • lift a swan
  • mince a plover
  • rear a goose
  • sauce a capon
  • scull a tench
  • side a haddock
  • splat a pike
  • splay a bream
  • spoil a hen
  • string a lamprey
  • tarne a crab
  • thigh a pigeon
  • thigh a woodcock
  • transon an eel
  • trench a sturgeon
  • tusk a barbel
  • unbrace a mallard
  • unjoint a bittern
  • unlace a coney
  • unlatch a curlew
  • wing a partridge

“Carving was a science that carried with it as much pedantry as the business of school-teaching does in the present day,” Beeton observed in 1875. By that time, happily, such lists were already considered “too long and too ridiculous to repeat.”