In his translation of Virgil’s Georgics, the seventeenth-century poet John Dryden refers to fish as “finny flocks.” A hundred years later, it was this sort of ornate poetic diction that William Wordsworth dismissed as “inane phraseology,” and then set out to revolutionize poetry by writing verse that used the language of ordinary people. The term belly-timber, meaning food, might appear to be another phrase like “finny flocks,” found only in the florid couplets of learned poets. However, belly-timber actually originated in the early seventeenth century as a commonplace, everyday term, although within fifty years it came to be seen as a ludicrous and affected compound; accordingly, after the mid seventeenth century, belly-timber was used only ironically, meaning that you could say it only while wiggling in the air two fingers of each hand. In Old English, the word timber originally meant house, having developed from an Indo-European source that meant to build. By the tenth century timber had come to mean building material, which was the sense from which belly-timber developed, food being the “building-material” of the human body. Later on, probably during the seventeenth century, timber gradually narrowed its meaning and came to signify wood or lumber specifically. The timbre that refers to the “colour” of a singer’s voice is an unrelated word.