Today is Cousins' Day, a day for us to look to the relative merits of what links one word to another. But today's word association game is a bit more colorful than our saying white and your responding with black. Get ready, all you golden-tongued speakers. We're tracing the connection that ties together two concepts, both considered valuable, but in very different ways: language and bullion. (来源：英语学习门户 http://www.EnglishCN.com)

The English language has an ancestor in the Middle French langue meaning "language; tongue." That same langue appears in langue de boeuf—literally "ox tongue" in Middle French. When Anglophones speak of langue de boeuf they are talking about either a pike with a very wide blade at the head and tapering rapidly to a point (used especially during the 15th century) or a short sword or dagger with this shape.

Another linguistic ancestor of langue de boeuf is boeuf, of course. Boeuf also turns up in the etymology of bully beef (or simply bully), a "pickled or canned usually corned beef." That name is believed to be a modification of boeuf bouilli, "boiled beef."

Speaking of boiling means we are almost to the end of our search. The same boil ancestor that cooked up boeuf bouilli appears in bullion. What's the connection between the name for "gold or silver measurable by weight" and boiling? Try this: the original, now obsolete sense of bullion named the melting house or mint.