sweetmeats are vegetarian and sweetbreads are made of meat
human language was a mistake and we are cowards for continuing to speak
sweetmeat: an item of confectionery or sweet food
sweetbread: culinary name for the thymus or pancreas of calf and lamb
humans shouldn’t be allowed to name anything
I’m a historical linguist! Have some explanation!
The word meat comes from Old English mete and originally just meant food in general. The word underwent semantic change (specifically: metonymy) so that eventually the word was used for a specific type of food, i.e., meat. So what did they call meat in OE if mete was food? Flæsc, which turned into ModE flesh (kind of like German Fleisch)(’Sup, West Germanic language family). So why do we have sweetmeat instead of, idk, sweet food? Idk. Compounds are weird, man, and the less often a word is used / more dialectal it is (never used “sweetmeat” where I came from), the less likely it is to undergo semantic change (Dr W actually talked about this in class Tuesday past).
So as to sweetbread. The -bread part in this is not etymologically related to bread. Bread, as in the stuff made from grain, came from OE… bread (which, funny story, actually use to mean “crumb” or “bit”; the original OE word was hlaf which then later turned into ModE loaf, and whose traces are in the words lord and lady [lord < hlaford < hlafweard “guardian of the loaf”; lady < hlæfdig, -dig < dæge “loaf maid; maker of the loaf”][these are some of my all-time favourite etymologies], but sometime in OE there was a meaning change and there you go). The -bread in sweetbread has kind of shaky etymology, coming (possibly) from OE bræd (æ could have possibly be written ae and then someone, probably a monk scribing somewhere, made a typo, and then people copied that typo, and then it became a thing due to analogy with bread [this is actually why the present tense and past tense of read are spelled the same way: past tense was ræd, with a long æ, but some monk made a typo and then the GVS happened and the rest is history]) which apparently also meant “meat”.
Why they decided to call it sweetbread as opposed to, idk, savourybread or somesuch is beyond me.
I’m sorry I’m such a huge nerd.
this is cool but am I still allowed to resent the outcome?
