collop

   This is a puzzling word which by the sixteenth century had come to mean a slice of meat, especially bacon. It has that sense in Collop Monday, which precedes Shrove Tuesday. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers also referred to parents leaving collops of their own flesh behind them when they died, meaning that their children survived them. In Henry the Sixth Part One, the shepherd calls La Pucelle his daughter, ‘a collop of my flesh’. In The Winter’s Tale, therefore, when Leontes calls his page ‘my collop’, it is to be interpreted as offspring, son. Such a meaning does not seem to have lasted beyond Shakespeare.