Let’s hear it for mighty mutton
PITY poor mutton. The dowdy, tallow-scented great aunt to lamb’s spring-scented youth. Whereas one giggles and gambols, all sweetly pulchritudinous vigour, the other clumps about in hobnail boots, scowling and tut-tutting, the very picture of Victorian gloom.
It doesn’t help that mutton, in popular parlance at least, has a less than salubrious past. Shakespeare’s ‘laced mutton’ was a prostitute. In the 16th century, the word was a euphemism for a lady of loose morals. By the 20th century, to ‘hawk one’s mutton’ was to,, introduced that term, it was the final nail in the mutton coffin.
