A new Cracked article is listing famous insults from literature. One they have is from Shakespeare’s King Lear where Kent berates Oswald with a list of insults. And one of the things he calls Oswald is “an eater of broken meats”.
What does that mean?
IIRC it means he’s eating other people’s leftovers. It’s insulting his social status.
"Back in the day, it was a serious insult if someone accused you of eating broken meats. Leftovers, hamburger, whatever you wanted to call it - if you ate that kind of crap, you were lower than the proverbial Whale Shit.
Nowadays we do not contemn the eater of broken meats… especially if those meats have been ground up and compressed into a sausage casing."
Sounds reasonable to me.
I just got done reading Emile Zola’s “The Belly of Paris,” who referred similarly to those unfortunates who would literally buy the leftovers scrounged from restaurants and replated into a sort of cheap takeaway in the low-rent section of the Parisian market district in Victorian times.
Yep, Kent is essentially calling him a beggar, someone living off of scraps from somebody else’s table. (Specifically, his employer Goneril: the point isn’t just that Oswald is of low birth, but also that he’s the ultimate bad servant, someone who’s bought himself a soft life by pandering to his mistress’s worst instincts. A parasite, essentially.)
IIRC, in Shakespeare’s time, leftovers from feasts would go to the poor outside. So they got meat that had been already served – the huge joint of meat was no longer in a big hunk, so it was broken.
Okay, so it’s a reflection of changing standards of behavior. We no longer regard eating leftovers as socially unacceptable. At least not since that time when Tim Curry served meat loaf to his guests.
I think we’d consider eating obviously touched leftovers off of someone else’s plate (outside of close family) to be pretty outre.
I live in the Dominican Republic and have seen a truck driving thru a poor Haitian neighborhood selling chicken guts and feet and the things that we don’t generally. Selling them by the handful for a few pesos. I’d guess it was something of that nature.
I thought it meant meats that are “shaved” like, “Pastrami, Corned Beef, Montreal Smoked Meat”. However, there may not have been any Montreal in the 1500’s. I truly don’t know.
But Montreal Smoked Meat is not very good - at least not in my opinion.
There must also be some association with the phrase “To break bread,” I would think.
If you do a Google search for “broken victuals” or “vittles,” you’ll find a lot of hits for the same concept.
Are you sure that you have quoted that phrase correctly?
I have never hear of, “An eater of broken meats.”.
If I had to guess, Might it be possible that someone with dislexia got it jumbled up and wrote, “An eater of brusquerie treats”?
Also “meat” originally referred to food of any kind, so eating someone’s left-over bread would get you similarly tarred.
I think the idea is that it’s someone else’s leftovers being eaten.
Now that’s just crazy talk.