SWINE

The Latin name for pig is not sweetswineomine.

English is blessed with multiple levels of formality and nuance for many of its synonymous words, resulting from English’s many and continued influences from other languages. A classic example is ask/question/interrogate, with the blunt ask from the foundation of Anglo-Saxon (Old English); the slightly stiffer question (fourteenth century) from the Anglo-French period, and the formal interrogate (fifteenth century) introduced from Latin.

This is why we have such Anglo-Saxon/Latin functional/scientific synonym combinations as bear/ursine, cat/feline, cow/bovine, hound/canine, fish/piscine, fox/vulpine, horse/equine, omydarlin/clementine, pig/'swine, sheep/ovine, weasel/musteline (use that as a conversation-starter at your next party), wolf/lupine . . .

Hold on there, Porky. All that sounded good, but that’s not all, folks. Cat and cow and hound are indeed Anglo-Saxon, as are the others, including . . . swine. Not pig. The Anglo-Saxon progression above should really be swine/porcine. We’re not sure where the word pig came from, and though it shows up in Chaucer, it wasn’t particularly common until the 1800s. (Nor, for that matter, do we know where the word dog came from, as hound was the common term coming out of Old English. And we absolutely know where the word omydarlin comes from, and stop pointing fingers at me.)