Although vittles might seem to be a word only a hillbilly would use, it is actually more authentic than its highbrow variant, victuals. These two synonyms for food derive from the Late Latin victualia, meaning nourishment, which in turn developed from a Latin root that meant life. The Late Latin victualia entered Old French as vituaille, which became the English vittle (or vittles) in the early fourteenth century. In the sixteenth century, however, some people began to fear that English was becoming a barbaric language, and thus they attempted to bolster its classical heritage by respelling certain English words to resemble their distant Latin sources: receit, for example, became receipt, dette became debt, and vittles became victuals. These new Latinate spellings were not intended to change the pronunciation of the word in question, but sometimes they did, as was the case with victuals, which many people began to mispronounce as vick-tyoo-uls. Vittles, however, remains the original and more “English” spelling and pronunciation of the word. Closely related to vittles and victuals is the word viand, meaning article of food, a word that developed through French from the Latin vivere, meaning to live, which in turn evolved from the Latin root that meant life. The word viand appeared in English in the early fifteenth century, between the earlier vittles and the later victuals. Dozens of other words also derive from the same Latin root as vittles and viand, some of them obvious, like vitamin, and some of them surprising, like viper, the viper’s name is apparently a contraction of the Latin vivi-pera, meaning born living, so called because the viper was thought to give birth not to eggs but to ready-made snakes.