 Today, in surprisingly connected etymologies, we're going hog wild. A hog and hyena may not seem all that similar to you, but apparently they did to the Greeks. Hog comes through the British Celtic hook, from the Celtic expressive form suko, from the Proto-Indo-European root su, meaning pig, which itself may have simply been imitative of the sound of a pig. In addition to giving us words such as swine and sow, this root comes into Greek as hus, swine, also giving us the word hyena. Guess the Greeks could make a hyena out of a sow's ear. Do you eat pork off of porcelain dishes? Etymologically, you should. Porcelain comes from Italian porcelana, which referred to a type of cowry shell, because the finish of the chinaware was thought to resemble the lustrous surface of the shells. The shell's name, in turn, comes from porkella, young sow, female pig, supposedly because the shape of the shell resembled the shape of the genitalia of the pigs. So it turns out that not only can you make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but also a porcelain plate out of a sow's... Do you like back bacon? Well, it's etymologically redundant. Both the words back and bacon descend from Proto-Germanic baka, meaning back. This becomes Frankish bako, an old French bakon, originally referring to a side of pigmeat, fresh or cured, and eventually narrowed to refer to a side of cured pigmeat, otherwise known through Germanic lines as a flitch, before becoming the standard word for any cured pigmeat. War and worst, as in bratwurst or liverwurst, which are both typically made from pork, both come from the Proto-Indo-European root wares, meaning to confuse mix up. Worst, which means sausage in German, comes from the idea of mixture, and war comes from the sense to bring into confusion and thus strife. This root also gives us the words worse and gorilla. The phrase sausage war is sometimes used to refer to an odd episode during the 1939 to 1949 winter war between the Soviet Union and Finland, in which a Soviet attack was crucially delayed when the undernourished Red Army stopped to eat sausage soup left behind by Finnish cooks, allowing Finnish reinforcements to arrive. Thanks for watching. This is one in a series of occasional short videos about connected etymologies. To see more, you can also follow the endless knot on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram.