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Will Penman
ENG 4060 – History of the English Language
Professor Paxson
Feb 6, 2009
A History of the Word Cow
When you hear "Old English," the word "cow" isn't the first thing that comes to mind. At first I wanted to research the word "noise," since I thought it was interesting that a word so basic to expressing life – a name for sound in general – carries an unshakable negative connotation. As it turns out, "noise" is Anglo-Norman and thus unsuitable for this assignment. Instead, I looked to a word even more essential to life: cow. Coincidentally, as benign as cows are and as stable as the word might be thought to be, "cow" has also come into a pejorative meaning. Unlike "noise," however, "cow"'s decline is closely linked to its feminine denotation. But creativity in employing "cow" doesn't stop at insults; the word is still productive today. From AD 800 in a Latin-English dictionary to a 2005 reference defining "cow-tipping", "cow" is alive and mooing (although it must be added that cows couldn't "moo" in literature until circa 1550).
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "cow" is older than English. A Common Teutonic word brought into Common Indo-germanic, "cow" enters Old English as cú. The root of it, though, is so old that the Aryan branch split to form the Greek and Latin equivalents. So "cow" is related etymologically to "bovine"! What's interesting, though, is that just like our loanword "bovine," outside the Teutonic languages the word was of both genders.
"Cow" had a rocky phonological start. Early on cú bifurcated to leave speakers in Scotland and North England saying ky and kye. Southern England took an extended form of kyne which means they had two words for "cow." I'm a little confused by it, and others were, too. In 1877 the Holderness Gloss said this: "Kye, cows. In West Holderness, kye is used to denote particular herds, kine being used for cows in general." That's manageable enough but for the spelling variants. The OED has several categories of spelling the plural. There's c©e, c©, kij, kuy, and several more as the centuries past. There's also cun, kyn, kuyn, and more in a similar progression. A third category lists an easily recognizable form: cows; and a fourth a variant used only in Cheshire pronunciation.
Semantically, "cow" is assured of at least one meaning: female bovines aren't going anywhere. And for most of the word's history, "cattle" has supplanted any need for an abstract reference to the species, but that's plural. It surprised me at first that we don't have a good word for either of the sexes. We have "dog" and "cat," I reason, so why don't we let "cow" mean "cow or steer"? I think my perception is based on a life that is so far removed from interaction with farm animals that I want to collapse my vocabulary as a result. About all I know is the rumor that cows have three stomachs. Similarly, for me the only use of having "chicken" and "rooster" is to make good riddles. (A rooster lays an egg on the roof of a barn, slanted at four degrees, with a wind blowing perpendicular at 10 mph. Which side of the roof does the egg land on?) Life in America is getting to a point that needing gender-specific names for animals is as specialized as needing the word "bitch" for female dogs.
Along those lines, though, I personally feel uncomfortable using the word "cow" to refer to a steer. Steer have horns! I think to myself. I can't give a feminine word to such a masculine creature! I have no problem, on the other hand, gracing a female animal with a masculine word. I think it reveals a bias deep in my thinking that prissifying a male is worse than masculinizing a female. Perhaps that's another conserving factor in the meaning of "cow."
"Cow" seems to have become a model for the feminine by the eighteenth century, since for certain other large animals (elephants, rhinoceros, seal, whale, etc.) the female is termed the "cow" and the male the "bull," and sometimes "cow" is even used as a "she-" particle, like "cow moose" or my favorite, "cow alligator": "In dimmer recesses the Cow alligator, with her nest hard by" (OED cow, n.1.3b 1946, 1880).
Speaking of large animals, by 1696 "cow" had come to mean "woman," although unlike today, the comparison was not one of girth but one of character. A woman was "likened to a Cow" if she was a "Lazy, Dronish, beastly Woman" (OED cow, n.1.4b 1696). It's been used as a general insult to women ever since. One later dictionary glossed it as "a woman; a prostitute," as if a woman were a kind of prostitute instead of the other way around. I'm surprised both at how late and how early this way of insulting women appeared. "Hen" had been applied to women almost one hundred years earlier, but as a cutesy term of affection (though "hen-pecked" appeared soon after in a decidedly non-affectionate sense). I wonder if men didn't appropriate "cow" for so long because cows had so much domestic use that it wouldn't be much of an insult.
Cows figured largely enough in people's lives to spawn a plethora of cow-related compound words. Simple words like cow-beef, cow-breath, cow-flesh, cow-hair, cow-shed, and cow-thief are all attested to, as well as words in the objective case: cow-driver, cow-farmer, cow-lifter. I myself have never lifted a cow, but I assume that if you had the right amount of strength (or a forklift) it could be done. Less obvious are words which would be important to cows: cow-pea (fodder in the southern US, apparently), cow-cabbage, cow-clover. A dialectal name for Silene inflata is cow-cracker, which is not a Latinate skull-basher but a purple flower cows might eat.
There are such classics as cow-pie and cow-lick. Paging through the OED I also came across some fun ones: the "cow" compound cow-blakes, a cow compound of dried dung used for fuel; and cow-sucker, which is perhaps a hedgehog.
I had hoped that the verb "to cow" was related to "cow" by functional shift. Unfortunately, the verb "to cow" (as in "to intimidate") came from Old Norse and didn't appear until Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth that cursed be the tongue "hath cow'd my better part of man" (OED cow, v.1 1605). Interestingly, though, "cow" as a verb has a secondary, opposite meaning arising not out of a fancy category of semantic change, but out of confusion with the verb "to cower": "Instead of ending like a man, he now cowed before me quite spirit-broken" (OED cow v.1 1844). "Cow" is a pretty exciting thing to be, I guess.
Thus "cow" is broken up, dissected, examined. I leave the consumption to you, because without it, "cow" would have been just another word. On the other hand, "cow" is just another word, and the changes – pejoration, generalization – that have accompanied it accompany language like the waves accompany the ocean. From our small spot on the beach of present-day we can see linguistic causes splashing in the distance. That process may have noise along the way, but it certainly includes a "cow" or two.
