long pig
1
9.9
- noun
- Offensive
:
carne humana
- In some cultures, culinary traditions may include dishes made from long pig, highlighting an unsettling part of human history.
Examples
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You know they call them "long pig."
Blog text (19) -
I love that they've now attacked junk food and that, in poisoning the entire population of the world and making everyone drug-addled morons, they're also going about poisoning every other supernatural creature that has a taste for the long pig.
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Folklore suggests that cannibals referred to human flesh as long pig due to its supposed resemblance to pork in flavor.
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Travelers in certain regions might hear stories of long pig being served as a delicacy in ritualistic feasts.
Synonyms
The meat of a person that other people eat
Surface Forms
Morphology
long + pig
The literal words 'long' and 'pig' do not transparently combine to mean 'human flesh' — a B1 learner who knows those words would likely imagine a physically long pig or some descriptor of the animal, not cannibalistic meat. The MWE is a culturally specific, euphemistic slang term for cannibalism, so its meaning is idiomatic and unpredictable from the constituents.
Etymology
The phrase long pig may come from sailors and explorers who said cooked human meat looked like pig meat but long, so they called it long pig. That's why the phrase means 'human flesh' when it is talked about as food.