fillet

English-speakers use the words fillet and flay in somewhat similar ways, maybe more so when speaking figuratively, to the point that you could imagine that they might a shared history. They don’t. Fillet came into English in the 1300s initially meaning “little headband,” which came from the Old French filet, “threat, filament; strip, ligament,” itself a diminutive of fil,”thread.” (Compare our world file, which comes from the French verb filer, “string documents on a thread or wire for preservation or reference.”) The connection between string and butchery, apparently, is that the process of fileting a piece of meat involved tying it up with string. Flay — “to remove the skin of,” which is a different sense of causing harm to flesh — goes back to the Old English flean, “to skin, to flay.” (The past tense of this word was flog, but it’s apparently not related to our word flog, which seems surprising since whipping someone could remove their skin.) That verb flean traces back to the Proto-Germanic *flahan, which goes back to the Proto Indo-European *pleik-, “to tear, rend.”