Cow: Best not to have one

But if you do, please don't make it broken coloured

Photo by Rogier van den Berg on Unsplash

I grew up surrounded by cows. My dad bought the farm off his dad soon after WWII, when it was still covered in gorse and scrub. By the time I was born in 1958, he’d turned a boggy, recalcitrant holding into a carpet of lush rye and clover, neatly subdivided by fences lined up straight and sharp as a blade of grass.

As a boy, I’d often help out during milking. I’d stand in the yard as Dad milked the cows and, as he finished milking one, walk another into the vacant stall.

One night, early in the season and still in the depths of winter, I stood in my raincoat and gumboots, enveloped by a shuffling herd of warm bovine bodies and the comforting smell of their breath. A few yards ahead of me, Dad was on his haunches beside a cow in one of the stalls, bathed in yellow light from the bulb above his head. He lifted the cups from her udder, stood and placed them on a hook, reached to the lever that opened the door into the race, and let her out of the stall.

Then he looked at me. “Bring the broken-coloured cow,” he said.

The what cow? Whatever language he was speaking, it was foreign to me. I picked a cow anyway. Maybe it would be the right one.

It wasn’t. The old man glared. “I said the broken-coloured cow.”

Uncertainty became panic. What do I do now? I know! Pick a cow that doesn’t look like that one.

Wrong again. The face up ahead turned menacing and dark. “THE BLOODY BROKEN COLOURED COW!” it yelled.

Ankle deep in cowshit, drenched by the freezing rain and terrified, I did the only thing left to me. I burst into tears.

A walk-through milking shed with not a broken-coloured cow in sight.

It was the start of what would become a fraught relationship with my dad, a man possessed of great humour and generosity, but troubled too by demons - perhaps from his wartime experience as a petrol truck driver - that could send him into a rage at any moment.

Cow has its origins in the Old English cu, which follows a well-trodden path via the Proto-Germanic *kwon to Proto-Indo-European root *gwou-. For a good part of that timeline, the word (in its various incarnations) meant any cattle, male or female. By the time it arrived in English, and possibly much earlier than that, it was used exclusively for female cattle.

The word can also apply to female elephants, whales, sea lions or moose. It can be used, too, for female cattle of any age, according to Britannica, but I’ve never heard a baby cow called anything but a calf or a heifer. Back on the farm, a heifer remained a heifer until she produced her first calf.

Heifer is from the Old English heahfore (or hehfaro or heffera), a word found in no language but English. Calf, on the other hand, can be traced back from Old English cealf down a similar path as cow, all the way back to PIE.

The calf on the back of your leg, however, is dairy free. It didn’t feature in English until the early 1300s, well after the heyday of Old English, and came to us via Old Norse kalfi - and no one knows where Old Norse got it from. One curious anatomical fact relating to calf is that this set of muscles is proportionally larger in humans than other mammals because of our upright stance. Another curious fact, which you’ll have already gathered if you were paying attention, is that there’s no such thing as the calf muscle; it’s actually three muscles - the gastrocnemius, soleus and plantaris - working together to make your legs look splendid in tight-fitting jeans, you sexy thing.

Have a cow, that thing Bart Simpson recommends you don’t do, was coined by Gertrude Stein in her 1923 work A Book Concluding With As A Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story. As with much of Stein’s writing, you can interpret the phrase as you wish, but as a reference to an orgasm is probably the most logical. By the time Bart Simpson came along, have a cow meant “get upset or angry”. Cowabunga, another Bartism, was popularised (as Kowa-Bunga) by Chief Thunderthud on American children’s show Howdy Doody in the late 1940s, then by surfies, then by Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster, and then by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Cow as in “intimidate” is a relative latecomer, only appearing about 1600. It’s probably from Old Norse kuga, “oppress”, which may be related to Old Norse kýr, (the bovine “cow”), thanks to cows’ reputation - justified in my experience - for being easily herded.

Cow became an insult for a woman in the late 1600s. It’s often preceded by one of a suite of even more insulting adjectives, none of which I’ll repeat here. Typically, however, it will operate as female insults so often do, referring to the target’s appearance or sexual behaviour - two measures that clearly relate to the quality of a person’s character or worth.

Next time you’re over the moon with joy, you can thank the cow in Hey Diddle Diddle for your elevated state. Unlike many nursery rhymes, this one almost certainly has no hidden, political meaning, but is simply a nonsense rhyme created to delight children. Not that that has stopped people from finding such meanings, which prompted Tolkien to take the mickey in his satirical poem The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late.

One of my fondest memories is of reciting Hey Diddle Diddle to my older son, picture book in hand, and leaving him to say the very last word of the poem. From his two-year-old mouth spoon came out as poon, something that filled me with happiness beyond measure and that I now keenly miss in a way that any parent of now-adult children will undoubtedly appreciate.

The cow jumps over the moon as the poon looks on.

Then, of course, there’s the French cow, aka la vache, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, one of the stupidest, aka funniest, scenes in any movie ever. Rewatching it now reminds how puerile my friends and I were when the movie was released - one of our group fell off his movie seat with laughter and had great trouble getting back up - and what a wonderful thing that was.

As for the broken-coloured cow, it turns out she was the one with the quiltwork of colours on her hide. Why my dad thought it was important that she was the next one to be milked, I’ll never know. All I do know is that I fetchezed the wrong cow not once, but twice, and now, sixty-odd years on, here we are discussing my childhood, its etymological ramifications, cows and Monty Python.

I must ask, dear reader, have you nothing better to do with your time?
​

---

Bits and specious

Someone had to invent the cardboard box.

Pakeha New Zealand’s uneasy relationship with Māori was highlighted a few days ago when Kaipara Mayor Craig Jepson declined a moment of silence in a council meeting for the recently deceased Kīngi Tūheitia. His reason: the matter wasn’t on the council agenda. The solution, of course, is simple. In future, any Māori leader planning to die should notify the council in advance so they have time to include a moment’s silence on the agenda.

Until the mid-13c, cattle could mean property of any kind. It’s related to the words chattel and capital. Whether wives were regarded as chattels in the Old Testament is the source of some debate. While some passages lend themselves to that interpretation (see Exodus 20:17 and Deuteronomy 5:21), others suggest such an interpretation may be a stretch. Here’s an interesting paper on the subject.

---

Quote of the week

Studying cows, pigs and chickens can help an actor develop his character. There are a lot of things I learned from animals. One was that they couldn’t hiss or boo me.
James Dean