Why are 'beef' and 'pork' and 'mutton' used to refer to the meat of cows and pigs and sheep? Other animals keep the same name. Is it just some weird preference in the English language?
American English vs British English – Why Are ‘Beef’, ‘Pork’, and ‘Mutton’ Used to Refer to the Meat of Cows, Pigs, and Sheep?
american-englishbritish-english
Related Solutions
In the United States, we say "detergent", or "laundry detergent". You can distinguish "liquid detergent" from "powdered detergent".
Technically, "soap" is made from bases while "detergent" is made from acids. (A chemist may be able to give a more precise definition, and my apologies if I muddled the simplification.) In practice, most people use the words interchangeably for products that are used on clothes or dishes. That is, you might call a bottle "laundry soap" or "laundry detergent". Likewise "dishwasher soap" or "dishwasher detergent".
Stuff you use to clean your body is always called "soap", not "detergent".
Technically "pale" refers to the saturation of the color, and "light/dark" refers to luminance, or the perceived brightness.
In AmE usage however, light can also mean a color that is not intense. I can't think of an instance where pale could be used for a color that is intense but light (or bright).
As I mentioned in my comment, in general conversation, you can use pale or light interchangeably when referring to a color and be understood. If the register is more formal and you're writing for a UK English audience, you should follow the advice in your book just to be certain your phrasing won't seem odd.
For each of the examples below, I went to DuckDuckGo.com and searched for images that matched the term. I had success with each color except for pale dark green - I ended up searching for "pale dark green" fabric to find an image where the color filled the frame. I picked from the first few results the ones I felt were distinct enough to show the difference. There is not a definite line where we can say "this green is pale to everyone who looks at it". Click on the image to see the original sized image.
This is both a light green and a pale green:
This is a light green but not a pale green:
This is bright green (both light in luminance and intense in color):
This is a pale dark green (might also be called gray-green):
This is a dark green (not pale This color is often called emerald or emerald green):
Best Answer
This is fundamentally a class distinction.
With any given amount of land and labor, more food value can be created from growing grain and vegetables than from growing animals for meat. In the medieval economy, the local lord had title to all the land and had a large amount of labor at his disposal as a sort of tax on his peasant subjects. The lord could thus afford to invest a portion of that land and labor into growing meat for his table. But the ordinary peasant family, with only their own labor and a small allotment of land, could not afford meat; they instead ate grain and vegetables.
For a couple of centuries after the Norman Conquest in 1066, the ruling class of England spoke mostly French, and spoke of the meat they ate using the French words for the animals: boeuf, porc, mouton. The peasants whose labor went into raising these animals for their lords' tables continued to call these animals by their native English names: cow, pig, sheep. And the lexical distinction remained after the landlord class adopted English. They had spoken of the food for several generations as beef, pork, mutton; and there was no corresponding term in English for the food, since the English words designated primarily the animal.