 Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today's word is beef. Surprisingly enough, a word all about war and conquest. One of the first things you'll hear when people talk about the history of the English language is the large-scale import of French vocabulary into English when the French-speaking Normans under William the Conqueror invaded Anglo-Saxon England in 1066. This sometimes led to modern English having pairs of words, one from each source, like cow and beef, sheep and mutton. Swine and pork. In each case, two words for the same animal, one from Anglo-Saxon, one from Norman French. You see, only a relatively small number of Normans came over with William, maybe 5,000 at the time of the invasion with another 20,000 over the next little while compared to the 1.5 million total population of England at the time. But William put his fellow Normans in all the positions of power and influence. They were the major landowners and the Anglo-Saxon populace made up the peasantry. And so the senses of these pairs of words break down on socio-economic lines. The Anglo-Saxon-derived cow came to refer only to the animal cared for by the Anglo-Saxon peasant and the French-derived beef came to refer only to the meat consumed by the rich Norman landowners. Same goes for sheep and mutton and swine and pork. Turns out they've been using French to fancy up menus for a very long time. The French beef, which turned into beef, comes from Latin boss Bovis which much later on came into English again as the adjective bovine. That Latin bov root is also part of the brand name Bovril. Bovril is a meat extract somewhat similar to Marmite which can be spread on toast or mixed with hot water to make a soup-like broth. Bovril was invented in the 1870s by Scotsman John Lawson Johnson while in Canada fulfilling an order to the French government to supply canned beef for the troops who had been undersupplied in the recently ended Franco-Prussian war. After all, we know an army marches on its stomach. Johnson had been put on to the science of food preservation when he studied at the University of Edinburgh under chemist and statement Lyon Playfair whose own contributions to science were somewhat less appetizing. In his political career, while Secretary of Science, Playfair advocated the use of chemical weapons against the Russians in the Crimean War, the first proposal for chemical warfare. The plan was considered but was rejected as being unethical and against the rules of warfare though Playfair would argue that war was inherently destructive anyway and anything that made it more destructive without increasing suffering would in fact end up decreasing suffering, an argument that continues to be used for advances in the science of killing. The irony is of course inescapable that this plan was put forward by a man named Playfair. But getting back to Bovril, what about the second element of the word? For that, Johnson was inspired by an outlander science fiction novel called Vril, The Power of the Coming Race, which features a subterranean civilization of super-humans who derived their power from a mystical liquid called Vril. The 1871 novel was written by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a politician and aristocrat who was notable for coining a lot of well-known expressions such as the Great Unwashed, the Almighty Dollar, and the clichéd literary opening It Was a Dark and Stormy Night. With such obvious talent, no wonder Bulwer-Lytton valued literary over-military endeavor, turning down an offer of a lordship of the Admiralty, as well as the Throne of Greece, lest it interfere with his literary career. And no surprise that he also coined the phrase, the pen is mightier than the sword. Bulwer-Lytton's novel Vril was so influential, it not only inspired the name Bovril, but apparently convinced many people that Vril and the underground civilization it supported were real. This may have inspired Nazi era occultist, at least according to science writer Willy Lee, who fled Nazi Germany to resettle in the United States and advocate the development of rocketry. This accusation was picked up on by conspiracy theorists who imagined the Nazis wanted to use this mystical Vril to win the war. But of course, the story is just a load of tripe. But getting back to the etymology of the word beef, it actually comes from a proto-Indo-European root, which also, it turns out, gives us the word cow by way of the Germanic branch of languages. So in fact, though we started off with the commonly made observation that the words beef and cow are a record of the battles between the French and English in the Norman conquest, etymologically, they're the same word after all. As with most war and conflict, our differences often end up being surface level anyway, and everything is interconnected. I'll be back soon with more etymological explorations and cultural connections, so please subscribe to this channel. You can also sign up for email notifications of new videos in the description below. If you have comments or questions, I'm at alliterative on Twitter or leave them in the comment section. You can also read more of my thoughts at my blog at alliterative.net.