Where’s the beef?

Why we're suspicious of fancy language

Perhaps you’ve noticed that we call animals one thing ‘on the farm’ and another ‘on the table’.

We have cows in the fields but beef on the table. Pigs in the pen but pork on the plate.

Deer in the woods, sheep in the meadows and a calf in the barn…

…but venison, mutton and veal when they’re on the menu.

This difference in words between barnyard and buffet started a thousand years ago when a French army invaded England and took over the country.

They were called Normans because they were from Normandy (yes, that Normandy).  These French knocked off the local English rulers and made the laws, government, and courts all French-speaking.  French was the official language of England for 300 years, the legal language for another 400 years after that, and is still used in the UK government in some ceremonial contexts today.

Meanwhile, the local working stiffs - the folks plowing the fields, raising the animals, logging the forests - kept speaking English.

Naturally, because they spoke two completely different tongues, each side kept their own names for animals.  

While it was still walking around “on the hoof”, the word stayed English - cow, deer, sheep, etc.  

And when it came out of the King’s kitchen and put “on the table”, dishes were called by their old French names - boef, venison, porc, mutton, and so on.

The language of our daily lives also shows this split between common words and a French version associated with elegance.

Workers eat, royals dine.  

Workers drink, royals imbibe.  

Workers talk, royals converse.  

Hundreds of other French words were imported into English to describe military, diplomatic, government, and legal matters: royal, attorney, army, judge, property, affidavit, subpoena, enemy and many more.  

Because these French words were associated with the wealthy, powerful rulers, you’ll notice that even 1,000 years later, they still sound a bit more refined, a touch fancier, more hoity-toity, more sophisticated.  That’s why you still find French words and their descendants in culture, academia and government today.

Heck, that’s why there’s still French on the first page of your United States passport!

The United States passport’s first page includes French, and since the Clinton Administration, Spanish translations.

So it’s been a long, long time that French has meant fancy in our language.

And there’s an emotional component to this as well.

As you can imagine, the French nobles who came over to England couldn't run the place by themselves.  They needed the help of locals to keep the population in order.  And, let’s face it, these “helpful locals” were what we’d now call collaborators.  Traitors to their country like Benedict Arnold, Coco Chanel, or the Ukrainains who hold the back door open for Russian troops today.

These collaborators were suck-ups to the invading French.  As the invaders whittled away rights, lands, and freedoms, the “helpful locals,” now fluent in the new masters’ tongue, dismissed objections and explained away breaches with new sophisticated words that the average person did not understand.

It’s a habit that has lasted centuries, in fact, with each new generation learning that English words seem to be associated with plain-spokenness and clarity, while the longer, more elegant-sounding French words are often used cynically to hide what the speaker means, rather than reveal it.

George Orwell, himself a socialist, decried this tendency in 1946, “when there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims,” political writers turn, “instinctively to long words.” While “a mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

Winston Churchill, as usual, said it best: “short words are best and the old words when short are best of all.”

Take, for example, the quotation at the top of that passport page above. It’s Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address, “…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

He purposely didn’t say:

“…that governmental institutions instituted by the population, with the citizenry as its primary beneficiary, and in conjunction with the expressed democratic desires of the populace, will not disappear from our planetary domicile.”

No, he used the plain, straightforward, short, old words because those communicate meaning best.

In fact, that’s the same reason that all of our great speakers have chosen to speak in Churchill’s short, old words:

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

It’s worth noting that our suspicion of flowery language doesn’t just come from the words being difficult, obscure, or foreign.  Contrast our skepticism of authorities’ double speak with the use of Latin in medicine or the sciences.  Even though few of us know the difference between a capacitor and a resistor, or understand what is meant by lateral epicondylitis (tennis elbow, from which your author currently suffers - ouch!), we give the benefit of the doubt to scientists and doctors because they clearly mean something specific by it, and are using their learning for our good.  Indeed, there are whole TV shows where the realistic use of medical jargon enhances our enjoyment of the show.

With regard to government, business or cultural authorities, on the other hand, we’ve come to our distrust of Orwell’s longer words honestly. We’ve learned that, just like those turncoats of a thousand years ago, too often sugar-coated words and fancy diction are a means of hiding intentions or even outright lying to us.

So the next time you get a corporate email about “a solution-oriented approach to empowering our brand positioning” or hear a government flunkie cynically state that “inflation has risen, largely reflecting transitory factors, overall financial conditions remain accommodative,” you have history, learning, and a thousand years of experience on your side if you find yourself asking, “Where’s the beef?”