I think it’s the difference between practicing it on an animal (“Look at how ‘lively’ it is now!”) and on a person (“See how much pain they’re in?”).
There isn’t - at least there’s no etymological connection between “eel” and “England” in either language, but rather there’s common roots for the English and Hungarian words.
“Anguilla” is Latin for eel, and there are a bunch of similar words across a number of European languages for eel, snake and worm due to common roots. Anglia and England (Engla land) come from the name of the Germanic tribe (Angles) that settled there. (There’s a bunch of "Anglia"s in England and Germany.) “Angles” means “people of Angul,” originally. So there’s no etymological connection between “eel” and “England” in either language, the words are just coincidentally similar sounding in both languages, allowing for some wordplay.
Mehta RS, Wainwright PC. Raptorial jaws in the throat help moray eels swallow large prey. Nature. 2007 Sep 6;449(7158):79-82. doi: 10.1038/nature06062. PMID: 17805293.
In other fish, pharyngeal jaws are simple blocklike bones. But the morays’ pharyngeal jaws looked as if they could deliver a vicious bite, despite being lodged deep in the throat. “They look like these incredible forceps,” Dr. Mehta said.
It turned out that scientists published observations of the pharyngeal jaws in the 1960s, but their work was forgotten. “These were exquisite papers, and I still don’t understand why no one followed up on them,” Dr. Mehta said.
Forty years later, she took a closer look at the jaws and observed that the muscles that connected the jaws to other parts of the skeleton were different from those in a typical ray-finned fish. Unusually long muscles ran from the jaws to the moray eel’s skull, for example.
Dr. Mehta began to wonder what would happen when those muscles contracted. “If these muscles shortened, they could pull this jaw really far forward,” she said. “But then we thought, ‘Oh, come on, does that really happen?’ ”
It does.
Dr. Mehta rigged up a high-speed video camera that could peer into the mouth of a feeding moray. “When we got the movies, we sat and stared in disbelief,” Dr. Wainwright said.
The movies showed that when morays lunge for prey, they first grab it with the teeth on their front jaws. The pharyngeal jaws then shoot forward out of the eel’s throat, into the mouth, and snap down on the prey.
For 194 days of the year (including Advent, Lent and all the other various holy days) the nobility of the 13th century ate fish (including beaver, porpoise, seal, puffin and barnacle geese) and they would have had several courses including eel. Fish were frequently gifted by one noble to another, some were highly prized, like the turbot.
I don’t know about you guys but unagi (freshwater eel) as sushi is awesome and one of the most popular I noticed in Japan. It’s one of the few that is cooked (the only other I can think of that is is Tamago, poached egg)
There’s Anago (saltwater eel) too, but it’s not as tasty to me, at least.
What about Electric Eels? They could power (later than Medieval Times, of course) a light bulb, a potato peeler, an am/fm radio, maybe an electric shaver for a few seconds.
I don’t know what kind of trade you could get for them, or how many you’d need to pay rent, but they’d be fun!
