There are many things that you might not want to eat, but in the Old Testament there is also a list of “abominable things” you are forbidden to eat. Deuteronomy, chapter fourteen, says that you may eat animals that chew the cud and also have a cloven hoof; however, you may not eat animals that chew the cud but do not have a cloven hoof; likewise, you may not eat animals that have a cloven hoof but do not chew the cud. In effect, these rules mean that you may not eat camels, hares, rock-badgers, or pigs. Other abominable and therefore forbidden menu items include teeming insects and several species of birds such as the ossifrage and the hoopoe (the ossifrage is an eagle whose name derives from the Latin ossifragus, meaning bone breaker, the hoopoe gets its name from its call). Deuteronomy also specifies—just in case you ever fancy doing this—that you may not boil the kid of a goat in the milk of its mother. The word abominable, by the way, comes from two Latin words: ab, meaning away from, and omen, meaning a supernatural warning: if an ancient Roman bumped into something abominable, it was a warning mat she should gingerly sneak away from it. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, however, scholars mistakenly believed that abominable derived not from ab and omen but from ab and homine, the word homine being a declension of the Latin homo, meaning human. These misguided scholars assumed, in other words, that abominable described something away from the nature of a human, and for a long time they even spelt the word with an ft as abhominable.