The terms dark meat and white meat came about during the 1870s in the United States as euphemisms for respectively the breast and legs of a cooked chicken. Rather than say such naughty words-which might cause the gentleman at the table to start thinking about the breasts and legs of the gentlewomen, which might cause them to fornicate, which might damn them to hell and, worse, bring eternal shame upon the house-people instead used the two tones of the chicken carcass to distinguish its parts. (For similar reasons, polite company of the time referred to the four supports of the tables and chairs as limbs to avoid having to speak the word). In the twentieth century, the terms dark meat and light meat have ceased to be euphemisms and instead have become useful ways of distinguishing the moister dark meat from the dryer white meat. White meat can also be used to refer more generally to meat such as chicken, veal, and rabbit as opposed to beef, mutton, and lamb; this use of the term dates back to the middle of the eighteenth century, but the corresponding term, red meat, did not appear until die end of the nineteenth century. Spelt as one word, the term whitemeat was also used from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century as a generic name for any food prepared from milk (meat, at the time, could be used to mean food in general).