There are two related cookery terms, one a strip of meat, and the other a roast tied with a string for cooking, and I was hoping one could be assigned to "filet" and the other to "fillet", but it does not seem so. It looks like the word came in (14cen) from the French filet (having already been specialized away from its root sense of "thread"), and gradually (to 17cen) had its "l" doubled for Englishness. "Filet mignon" the OED dates no earlier than 1906!
http://www.m-w.com makes a distinction between the two (and includes multiple pronunciations for fillet!). According to Merriam-Webster, filet is derived from the french word for net, so you could probably argue that it's the proper word for roast-tied-with-a-string. That starts to get close to the whole proscriptivist vs. descriptivist linguistics debate, though.
According to Merriam-Webster, filet is derived from the french word for net, so you could probably argue that it's the proper word for roast-tied-with-a-string.
It would be tidy, but OED reports that "fillet" has earlier usage for that (and makes etymological sense there, too), so I think we have to let it all be a glorious haggis.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: fillets
Date: 2004-04-06 03:54 pm (UTC)fuh-loy
Date: 2004-04-07 05:21 am (UTC)Re: fuh-loy
Date: 2004-04-07 02:46 pm (UTC)It would be tidy, but OED reports that "fillet" has earlier usage for that (and makes etymological sense there, too), so I think we have to let it all be a glorious haggis.