Ham

Ham has a number meanings. Starting in chronological order, 'ham' in Old English, which means Anglo-Saxon English before 1150, meant a village or cluster of houses. 'Ham' as a suffix still appears in place names like Birmingham and Nottingham, which, of course, are modern-day cities. There is still a place called 'Ham', on its own as a name, near Richmond in the county of Surrey in England. 'Hamlet' meaning a small village is, of course, the diminutive of ham, and dates from Middle English i.e. between 1150 and 1350. Ham, referring to the back of the knee and hence the thigh of humans, usually in the plural, is first attested from the mid-1500s. From about the early 1600s, ham was also applied to quadruped animals. From 1637, according to the OED, it was more specifically applied to the leg or thigh of pigs, and once these were salted and preserved, ham became the salted pig's meat that we all know today. Ham, referring to a showy, second-rate, amateurish actor, or which describes the performance of such an actor, dates from the mid-19th century and is thought to be an abbreviation of the 19th century American phrase, ‘hamfatter’. Hamfatter was the name given butchers who produced poor quality ham with excessive fat on it. With the advent of radio, the notion of 'amateurish' was applied to 'radio hams', amateur radio operators, from c. 1919.