Pablum is the trademark name of a gruel fed to infants and other individuals too weak to defend themselves. The brand name was first registered in the United States in 1932 and derives from pabulum, a word meaning nourishment or food, which was borrowed directly from Latin in the early eighteenth century. Much further back, the Latin word pabulum developed from an Indo-European word meaning to nourish. This Indo-European word is the ancestor not only of pabulum, but also of the words pastor—a person who feeds his flock—and pasture—a place where a flock is nourished. In fact, this lost Indo-European word is even the ultimate source of the word food itself. The lack of outward resemblance between the word pabulum and the word food demonstrates how thousands of years of sound changes and spelling changes can disguise linguistic relationships.