On 2014-12-25, 7:18 AM, Holger Granholm -> Alan Zisman wrote:   
      
      
    HG> My theory is that it was the salesmen selling meat that wanted to tell   
    HG> buyers that the meat they sold was tender since the meat of young ani-   
    HG> mals is always more tender than the meat of their elder siblings.   
      
    AZ>> Now most people in North America live far from anyplace where farm   
    AZ>> animals are grown - and their vocabulary has become impoverished for   
    AZ>> words that describe these animals, except in the most generic way -   
    AZ>> 'chickens', 'pigs', 'cows', and 'horses'.   
      
    HG> Yes and because of that most farm animals slowly became known to the   
    HG> general public by the names of the offsprings.   
      
      
   English evolved as a Germanic-family language (Anglo-Saxon) that added Latin   
   and French   
   words following the Norman Conquest - at that time, the French-speakers were   
   the lords, while the Anglo-Saxon speakers were the peasants - as a result, the   
   words for the farm animals tend to be German/Anglo-Saxon while for food tend   
   to be French-derived:   
      
   Cow vs beef   
   Swine vs pork   
      
   --- Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.10; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130620 Thund   
    * Origin: Fidonet Via Newsreader - http://www.easternstar.info (1:123/789.0)