Malahack

This was the word-of-the-day recently in my Forgotten English desktop calendar.

A word ludicrously fabricated which means to cut or carve in an awkward and slovenly manner.
- Rev. Robert Forby's Vocabulary of East Anglia, 1830

Feast Day of St. Martin, for whom geese served as both nemesis and symbol. Martin hid in a barn to avoid being made a bishop but was exposed by a honking goose. He died in 400, reportedly from eating goose. Since then, that fowl has traditionally been eaten on his feast day.
In pre-industrial Britain, specific verbs were employed for carving particular types of game and poultry, and in some circles use of the wrong term was viewed with a contempt similar to that shown a modern speaker of the word ain't. In his [Medical] Receipts (1696), William Salmon offered some examples, including: "rear that goose; spoil that hen; fract that chicken; sauce that capon; unbrace that mallard; unlace that coney; dismember that heron; disfigure that peacock; display that crane; untach that curlew; unjoin that bittern; allay that pheasant; wing that quail [or partridge]; mince that plover; thigh that pigeon; break that hare."

Some of these terms make me queasy. Spoil? Disfigure? Display? These are Ripperesque terms, the sort of language that might have been used to describe his victims.

But others conjure up more lighthearted thoughts. "Fract that chicken," for instance. When I worked at the Bank of Bermuda one of my staff (Shawn, Cicely's son), would say, "I'm going to fock up a chicken," on his way out to KFC. That's similar, no?