swine

Swine means pigs — the old collective word for them, and it stays the same in the plural: one swine, a hundred swine. Mud-caked backs in a pen, a vet talking about swine fever, the herd of swine that runs down the hill in the Bible story.

Modern English keeps swine alive in two places. Farmers and vets use it as the technical term: swine flu, African swine fever, swine production. Everyone else uses it as an insult — you swine, that lying swine — an old-fashioned British one that sounds like a man in a black-and-white film. For the animal in ordinary talk, say pig; nobody in a supermarket asks where the swine is. Swineherd, the person who looks after them, survives in fairy tales and nowhere else. And cast pearls before swine, which comes from the same Bible, means offering something fine to somebody who cannot see the point of it.

Phrases it lives in

• cast pearls before swine — to offer something valuable to somebody unable to appreciate it