As a culinary term, the word mess persists only in biblical usage, as in the “mess of potage” for which Esau sold his birthright, and in military usage, as in mess hall. The word originally referred simply to a portion of food, enough to fill one’s belly, and derived ultimately from the Latin word mittere, meaning to send. From this word the Vulgar Latin missum was formed, meaning something sent, especially food sent to the table. Missum entered French as mes before being adopted by English as mess at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Because the word mess referred indiscriminately to any sort of food—literally anything, good or bad, “sent” to the table—it began to decline in status, and by the early eighteenth century had developed the sense of animal fodder. Those who have fed slop to pigs, or who remember what a “dog’s breakfast” looked like before the invention of Puppy Chow, will know that domestic animals have often been fed a farrago of jumbled leftovers; as a result of this association with mixed-up animal food, mess developed its now primary sense of jumble or confusion. Culinary words such as stew—as in, “We’re in a real stew now”—and hodgepodge—originally a dish of mixed meat and vegetables—underwent a similar shift or expansion in meaning. Another word that also developed from the Latin mittere is the Catholic term mass. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the priest concluded the Eucharisric service by saying “Ite, missa est,” meaning “Go, it is the sending-away.” Eventually, worshippers who understood Latin poorly began to assume that missa, which evolved into the English mass before the tenth century, was the actual name of the service.