Technically, divination by examining the entrails of sacrificed animals (rarely greyhounds in the real world, I might add) is known as extispicy, a word I’d not encountered until recently. The discovery allowed me to delightedly add a definition to my English Delusionary: Extispic Etymology, or “predicting a word’s history by examining its clumsy vivisection.”

On the other hand, allow me to reveal a word history based on more-precise physical vivisection, in this an entry from my book Unfortunate English:

It’s a scene worthy of Hannibal Lechter or Jeffrey Daehmer or your favorite cannibal of choice. A human being is slashed open, revealing intestines and other entrails. It’s bloody, it’s gory, it’s . . . kind of like visiting the meat counter of the grocery store, with its tasty display of neatly packaged sausages.

At the time of this image and the verbal imagery that resulted, there weren’t any grocery stores as we know them, of course. The image may very well have occurred on a field of battle, where someone inclined to odd poetry viewed the insides of the eviscerated, and saw . . . sausages. (Perhaps the poetry wasn’t that odd, in that sausages are meats stuffed into casings—and the original casings were animal intestines.) In Latin, the word for small intestine was a diminutive of the word for sausage.

We use that diminutive word today, by the way, in a couple of forms. The Latin word was botulus, which was taken into Old French as boel, and into Middle English as bouel, what you and I now spell bowel. (The other form is botulism, the medical term adapted from German, describing not an affliction of the bowel as one might be prone to guess, but instead a type of food poisoning often associated with ill-prepared processed foods—originally and specifically, sausages.)

The new science of Extispic Etymology at its finest!