Although the word carnival is now used in a general sense to mean festival or even circus, the word originally had a much more precise application: it referred specifically to the holiday before Lent when Roman Catholics made merry and feasted, activities not permitted once the forty days of Lent began. To remind people that this was their last day to feast/ this celebration was called, in Medieval Latin, the carnelevarium, a word formed by compounding the Latin carnem—a declension of caro, meaning meat or flesh—with levare, meaning to lift away. Literally therefore, the carnelevarium was the day before the meat was taken away. In Italian, carnelevarium evolved into carneleval, which was later shortened to carneval, the form that English adopted as carnival in the mid sixteenth century. Closely associated with the Roman Catholic Carnival is Mardi Gras, a festive holiday whose French name, meaning fat Tuesday, alludes to the custom of using up all the cooking fat in the kitchen before Lent. Other words that derive from the same Latin source as carnival include carnivore (a meat eater), carnation (a flesh-coloured flower), incarnation (meaning in the flesh), and chili con came (meaning chili peppers with meat). Several other familiar words derive from the same source as the gras of Mardi Gras, including grease, a type of melted fat, and crass, a word used to describe people whose behaviour is as thick and base as fat.