"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 23/01/18 (walnut and Wales, Cornwall, meat, dear)

I'm going to swerve to Jonathan Wilbur, who e-mailed in to say, "I seem to remember that the country called Walesis somehow linked to a nut. Am I dreaming?"And the answer is no, Jonathan, you're not dreaming. There is a very strange link between the two. The nut in question is a walnut., and I'll start with that, because the WAL part of the is came from an  old English word that meant foreign. In other words, the walnut was the foreign nut, and it was called in order to distinguish it from the native hazelnut. It was introduced from Gaul and Italy, and so it was seen as beign slightly exotic, and in fact the Roman name for it was nux gallicia, the Gaulish nut. And when you think how variety footstuffs in Anglo Saxon times was a lot narrower than it is today, it make sense that it was probably just ine foreign nut at the time. And you can see the same process goin on in the word meat, because meat once meant al food, not just a flesh of an animal. Vegetables in those days, for example, were sometimes known as green meat. And it make sense, once you know that it meant all food, a lot of expressions in English like, "It's meat and drink to me". "One man's meat it is another man's poison". And the morning was called before meat, and the afternoon sometimes was called after meat, so it was used in that general sense, and similary, a deer was any wild animal at all before it became more restricted in meaning. A dear actually comes back to an ancient word  meaning a creature that breathes, which is obviously behind animals as well. Anima - it has a spirit and breath. But back to walnuts. The first element, as I say, meaning foreign is also behind the country name Wales, and it was known as such because it wasn't Anglo Saxon, and so the Welsh were seen as foreigners. And you also find that same root in Carnwall. Cornwall and the Cornish were literally the foreigners who lived on the long horn or the corn of headland, and in surenames Walsh and Wallace. All originally seen as foreign to the Anglo Saxons.