The English words “cow,” “pig,” and “sheep” come from Anglo-Saxon — but “beef,” “pork,” and “mutton” come from Norman French, supposedly a linguistic fossil from the centuries after 1066 when Anglo-Saxon peasants raised the livestock in the field and French-speaking nobles ate the meat at the table

The beast keeps its Saxon name while somebody has to tend it, and turns Norman the moment it becomes a pleasure. Cooking is overwhelmingly French, per Őrsi’s survey: boil, fry, roast, stew and broil all arrive from Norman or Old French. The theory assumes French words stuck only to what nobles ate, while English words stuck to what commoners handled. But French vocabulary moved through the trades that fed the table, not just the meat on it. Goat meat is called goat meat, flatly, with no French veil at all, and American producers have spent decades trying to correct that.