ham

\ \ [OE] The etymological meaning of ham is ‘bend’ – it comes from Germanic *kham- ‘be crooked’ – and up until the 16th century it denoted exclusively the ‘part of the leg at the back of the knee’ (a portion of the anatomy now without a word of its own in English). Hamstring [16] reflects this original meaning. From the mid-16th century, it gradually extended semantically to ‘back of the thigh’ and hence ‘thigh’ generally, and by the 17th century it was being used for the ‘thigh of a slaughtered animal, especially a pig, preserved and used for food’. Ham in the sense ‘performer who overacts’, first recorded in the late 19th century, apparently comes from an earlier hamfatter ‘bad actor’, which may have been inspired by the Negro minstrel song ‘The Ham-fat Man’.