A dinner host in the 17th century might have wished for a usage manual — a different term was used for carving each dish, and, according to Samuel Orchart Beeton, “for a person to use wrong terms in relation to carving was an unpardonable affront to etiquette.” One might:

• allay a pheasant
• barb a lobster
• break a hare
• chine a salmon
• culpon a trout
• disfigure a peacock
• dismember a hen
• display a quail
• fin a chevin
• fract a chicken
• frush a chub
• gobbet a trout
• lift a swan
• mince a plover
• rear a goose
• sauce a capon
• scull a tench
• side a haddock
• splat a pike
• splay a bream
• spoil a hen
• string a lamprey
• tarne a crab
• thigh a pigeon
• thigh a woodcock
• transon an eel
• trench a sturgeon
• tusk a barbel
• unbrace a mallard
• unjoint a bittern
• unlace a coney
• unlatch a curlew
• wing a partridge

“Carving was a science that carried with it as much pedantry as the business of school-teaching does in the present day,” Beeton observed in 1875. By that time, happily, such lists were already considered “too long and too ridiculous to repeat.”