Holy Cow!

by Boze Hadleigh

  (The Japanese good-guy in the fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, was called Tiger Tanaka.)

  A tiger economy is one of the dynamic economies of various smaller East Asian nations (smaller by comparison with China and Japan), such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore.

  A paper tiger is a fake, an adversary of much bluster but little threat. The phrase was repeatedly used by Chinese leader Mao Zedong during the Vietnam war, in reference to the United States and its allies.

  Tiger lilies are tall orange Asian lilies spotted (not striped) with black or purple.

  Tiger. . .

  A tiger, typically used for a male, is somebody dynamic, virile or both. Tigers are thus often used as icons or mascots for sports teams or products promoting energy, endurance or health (see Tony the Tiger, ironically pitching sugared corn flakes).

  A toothless tiger is an authority given inadequate powers or resources to perform its task.

  To have a tiger by the tail is to find oneself fighting a bigger adversary or battle than one had thought (bitten off more than one can chew!).

  To ride a tiger is to find that what or who you thought you were controlling is controlling you.

  A cliché phrase in many romance novels is that a husband should be faithful as a dog but jealous as a tiger.

  Tiger’s eye is a yellowish-brown semi-precious quartz with a shimmering band of luster.

  Tiger Tim was a popular British comic strip in the early 20th century.

  Tiger butter is a “striped” (swirled) fudge-like candy usually including milk chocolate, white chocolate, and peanut butter. In the Indian story of Little Sambo, four competing tigers grab each other by the tail, racing around a palm tree faster and faster until all that’s left is a pool of butter, or ghi, as it’s called in India.

  A tiger nut is the edible small dried tuber of a type of sedge (a grasslike plant). Doesn’t sound very tasty—especially after tiger butter.

  A feline-titled movie was Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970). Those words were the code name for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—tora means tiger.

  And a blind tiger, alternatively known as a blind pig, was an illegal bar during the catastrophic US social experiment known as Prohibition.

  HORSES

  Currying Favor

  What would an expression meaning to try and ingratiate oneself have to do with a horse, which has no favors to bestow, or with currying, which is grooming a horse with a currycomb? The answer is that this was no ordinary horse. Favel or Fauvel was the protagonist of an eponymous satirical French romantic poem written in 1310 whose popularity endured for centuries. Favel was a chestnut horse—formerly a centaur, half-man and half-horse—who symbolized cunning and duplicity and could be dangerous. People therefore groomed or curried him to stay on his good side and to benefit from his wiles. With time and the switch from French to English, Favel became Favor, and today one simply curries favor.

  Clotheshorse

  Also spelled clothes horse. Has nothing to do with how horses look or dress, is related to the more prosaic sawhorse, an American term for a rack supporting wood to be sawn. Likewise, a laundry rack or frame for drying washed clothes derived from the concept of a “horse” being something on which something else is placed, usually a human. The original human clotheshorse was a fashion model, derided (no pun) as a mere frame, typically a skinny one, on which to place or hang a designer’s latest creation. Today a clotheshorse is anybody “with a wardrobe to choke Mrs. Astor’s pet horse”—a lyric from the 1975 movie musical Funny Lady.

  Nautically, a sawhorse is a horizontal rail, bar, or rope in a sailing ship’s rigging.

  The reason a ten-dollar bill is nicknamed a sawbuck is that the latter is a type of sawhorse, which has X-shaped ends. The Roman numeral 10, or X, appeared on ten-dollar bills back when sawbuck was first recorded, in 1850.

  Changing Horses in Midstream

  Sometimes a leader’s use of an expression in a political speech makes it widely known overnight, often in a slightly amended form, as with Winston Churchill’s “blood, sweat, and tears.” This equine expression about sticking with a course or policy already embarked upon rather than courting disaster through change is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln. However, he made it famous, rather than invented it. During a speech to the National Union League in 1864, the president used it to acknowledge both his nomination for a second term and the fact that many people believed he was mismanaging the Civil War.

  Lincoln said the situation brought to mind the story of “an old Dutch farmer who remarked to a companion once that ‘it was not best to swap horses when crossing streams.’” Abe felt the League had likewise concluded “that it is not best to swap horses while crossing the river, and have further concluded that I am not so poor a horse that they might not make a botch of it in trying to swap.”

  The slangy “swap” was eventually replaced with “change,” and the warning phrase now is nearly always couched negatively: “Let’s not change horses in midstream.”

  On a more modern, less polite note, the following political graffito was scrawled on many a public-bathroom wall in its day: “Why change Dicks in the middle of a screw/Re-elect Nixon in ’72.” Had the writers but known about Watergate!

  A Mare’s Nest. . .

  Before they were called veterinarians, they were horse doctors, as horses were their major patients, also livestock and other farm animals. Treating an ailing cat or dog, or any other pet (say, a parrot), was then considered frivolous, a waste of money and the vet’s time. The name comes from the Latin veterinae, cattle.

  Horsewomen also weren’t taken seriously for a long time. Apart from historic females on horseback like Boadicea in Britain trying to force the Romans out, and Joan of Arc successfully repelling the English in France, women on horses were a rarity of the sort sometimes found in a circus, as many were by the 1800s.

  Sidesaddle was designed by men for women, and by the Victorian era it was improper for a lady to ride a horse any other way. One Byzantine princess believed that a female normally astride a stallion could only excite him into an uncontrollable gallop. Barbara Stanwyck, who starred in several film westerns, asserted, “I’ve ridden both ways, and I grant you, sidesaddle looks graceful, but it’s too damned easy to fall off! I got used to it, but I wouldn’t willingly choose it for myself.”

  A palfrey, its name partly from the Latin for light horse, is a docile horse once intended for women to ride. (Unusually, the male stars of TV’s long-running western Bonanza admitted they were unaccustomed to and uncomfortable on horses.)

  Nag is a derogatory term for a horse, especially one that’s old or ailing. It originally meant a horse for riding, rather than a draft animal. A mount is also a horse for riding, as is a saddle horse. A dobbin is a draft horse or farm horse (in the 16th century Dobbin was a nickname for Robert).

  The other nag, both the verb and the noun attached to a wife who repeatedly asks her reluctant husband to do something, doesn’t have an animal origin. Unlike another stereotypical wife, a shrew, named after the mouselike mammal with teeny eyes and no particular temperament that became synonymous with a bad temper, which trait was applied to wives, not husbands.

  A mare’s nest is an impossibility, so to find one means to make a discovery that proves worthless. One source of the phrase may be a Central European fable about a discontented youth who searches in vain for a magical mare’s nest. Regardless, paintings of mare’s nests are unique and often fetching.

  Horseradish

  Grated horseradish root, cream, and vinegar combine into a condiment often considered a must with prime rib or roast beef. Of course horseradish has nothing to do with horses. Nor is this member of the cabbage family a radish, though in some cultures it was deemed a larger, coarser, more pungent version of same. The first written reference to the plant was in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, published in 77–79 CE. The Roman scholar believed it had medicinal value, as many still did in the Middle Ages.


  The horse connection may have accrued via an early method of processing the vegetable by crushing it under a horse’s hoof. More likely, it’s due to an English mistranslation of the plant’s German name, Meerrettig, or sea radish, since it grew along the coastline. Meer (sea) was confused with the English mare (a female horse), resulting in the same type of permanent misnomer as the Pennsylvania Dutch, who were German (Deutsch), not Dutch (Nederlander) immigrants. Didn’t people check these things?

  Horseplay

  A morris dance is a traditional English dance performed alfresco by groups of dancers holding sticks or handkerchiefs, whose costumes feature small attached bells. At country fairs the dancers were often joined by players on hobby horses—a model of a horse’s head, on a long stick. The faux horses entertained the throngs with rambunctious but harmless “horseplay.”

  Morris derives from Moor or Moorish. Traditional Othello casting aside, a Moor is a North African Caucasian, often of mixed Arab and Berber descent, and frequently from Morocco or Mauretania.

  Horsing around is typically energetic but basically benign, as befits the equine image (imagine bulling around).

  Horseface

  Obviously if someone has a horseface they have a longer than usual visage. Horse is usually mentioned, unless the focus is presumed sadness. Example—He: Are you Celine Dion? She: No. He: Then why the long face?

  The adjective horsey is often used about long-faced people, particularly actors. For instance Fred Gwynne, best known as Herman Munster but much horsier-looking sans Munsters makeup on Car 54, Where Are You? He later explained, “My face was my fortune and my curse . . . it’s made for comedy. Until I got older and could play mean old bastards.”

  Far more actresses than actors have been described as horsefaced, especially during Hollywood’s golden era when older character actresses were prominent. Director George Cukor told this writer that lovable and respected though they were, “Come lunchtime, you almost felt like offering them a feedbag.” Edna May Oliver declared, “Being made an equine comparison of is no tragedy if critics aren’t alluding to an old nag but, as I like to think of it, a thoroughbred champion. Let them put that in their pipe and smoke it!”

  Horsey can also refer to people of means who frequent race tracks, as in the line from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie about “the horsey set on Long Island.” That play’s symbolism features a crystal unicorn which, accidentally knocked to the ground, loses its horn and becomes like the other horses.

  Famous Horses

  There has always been a handful of famous horses at any given time. Once, they were those of rulers and military leaders, for example, Alexander the Great’s Bucephalus, a virtual companion to the long-roving conqueror. Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology, is another of few equines remembered from ancient times. More recently, there have been racing champions like Secretariat and film-cowboys’ steeds like Roy Rogers’s Trigger (renowned too for his stuffed afterlife) and the on-screen mounts of characters like the Lone Range (Silver), plus Mr. Ed from the eponymous TV series (Bamboo Harvester was the palomino that played him) and B-movie-series star Francis the Talking Mule.

  Cesar Romero, a.k.a. the Joker on TV’s Batman, was one of several actors who depicted the Cisco Kid (the first, Warner Baxter, won a Best Actor Oscar in the role, in the 1929 film In Old Arizona). Romero recalled, “I’m not a great pet lover and riding’s not my favorite sport, but in very little time I came to feel closer to my horsey costar than I ever did to any human costar, with one exception. . . . An animal trainer told me there’s a very atavistic relationship between human beings and their horses, which I can well believe.”

  Writer-director Arthur Lubin, who created both Francis and Mr. Ed, felt, “People take a horse seriously in a way they don’t with a smaller animal. When I added speech, audiences reacted exactly as if two people were relating and talking to each other. It’s a winning combination!”

  The favorite horse of a family named Mars who were in the confectionary business wasn’t famous, but in 1930 they named their new candy bar after him. His name was Snickers.

  The Horse’s Mouth. . .

  Straight from the horse’s mouth is firsthand and presumably accurate. The phrase implies provability, as in olden days when a man went to buy a horse. A rare woman might buy a horse, but women were themselves chattel, not allowed to own property or major possessions in their own names. Chattel, which now rhymes with cattle—pronunciation changes more often than spelling—is from the Old French chatel, whose Anglo-Norman French variation catel yielded the word cattle.

  A horse was then as major an expenditure as a car is today, and one didn’t want to overspend on an animal with possibly not much work left in it. The chief method of gauging a horse’s age was to examine its teeth and see how much they’d worn and how far the gumline had receded.

  Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth is also from the long period—human history till the twentieth century—when most transportation was equine. It was considered the height of rudeness to check a horse’s teeth and therefore its value when the horse was a gift (like asking for the receipt of a present today).

  The warning to beware of Greeks bearing gifts derives from Homer’s epic The Iliad, about the war pitting Trojans against Greeks. In order to get inside heavily fortified Troy—where Helen, originally not of Troy, was—the Greeks built a huge wooden horse in which were secreted several soldiers. The gargantuan equine, standing outside the city gates, intrigued the Trojans, many of whom believed it was sent by the gods. The horse was brought inside, the soldiers emerged, and the rest is, if not necessarily history, a riveting story and a warning to check the contents of a tempting present.

  Speaking of a horse’s mouth, it’s nearly impossible for horses to vomit, due to the acute angle between an equine throat and stomach. Vomiting enables humans to purge sick-making substances, whereas horses often die from colic.

  Dark Horse

  By the 1500s to keep something dark meant keeping it a secret. But the phrase a dark horse, meaning an unknown quantity or one kept secret, was created by Benjamin Disraeli in The Young Duke (1831). The debut novel features a horse race in which both favorites are beaten to the finishing line when “a dark horse which never had been thought of rushed past the grandstand in sweeping triumph.”

  It was standard practice for owners to hide the potential of promising new horses until the day of the race. The 27-year-old aristocrat’s novel led to such animals becoming known as dark horses, regardless of their color. Thirty-seven years later, the writer-politician became Prime Minister and later the first Earl of Beaconsfield—the Disraelis were ex-Jews; non-Christians weren’t allowed to stand (run) for Parliament.

  Today a dark horse can refer to a person of unknown abilities or one who’s kept them to herself or himself and may surprise others.

  Horse Words

  Horse whisperer was a little-known term for somebody claiming special understanding of equines and an ability to communicate with and soothe them. The book and movie of the same name, TV programs, also dog whisperers, cat whisperers—any kind of whisperer but a hoarse one, for it’s a lucrative field—have made this a household phrase. (A planned UK TV series is titled The Husband Whisperer.)

  Horse opera became a nickname for western movies and then TV series by the 1940s. It’s also a sob story, as in “Her whole horse opera sounds like a lie.” Within a few paragraphs on page 176 of the paperback of Edna Sherry’s 1948 novel Sudden Fear (later filmed) are four animal phrases, three signifying baloney: a fish tale, horse opera, sounds fishy, plus like a cornered rat.

  Horse trading was the sale of a horse or the exchange of two horses. Today horses need not be involved. Because it could take longer to judge the value of a horse than most animals, with more room for cheating on the part of the seller, horse trading was often hard and intense. Horse trades often involved one man giving something besides a horse to even the swap. Likewise, business agreements dubbed
horse trades or horse trading frequently involve bargaining and skillful discussion.

  Horseflesh represents horses collectively, and a connoisseur of horseflesh makes a good horse trader.

  A horse pistol was a larger model that a rider carried at the pommel of his saddle. Pommel, the projecting front part of the saddle in front of the rider, is from the Latin pomum, fruit or apple, because of its shape.

  Horsehair, from the mane or tail of a horse, is used in padding furniture and was sometimes used in wigmaking.

  Horsepower

  The term horsepower was coined by James Smeaton in 1724 in the UK. A maker of scientific instruments, he improved the efficiency of steam engines and used “horsepower” to calculate their relative workload capacity. This is often wrongly attributed to James Watt, who was overoptimistic about horsepower force; Smeaton’s estimate was closer to its true value. Smeaton, who also improved the efficiency of watermills and windmills, devised the term civil engineer to distinguish what he did from what military engineers did.

  Horsepower measures how hard a car engine must work to lift 550 pounds (250 kilograms) one foot (30 centimeters) in one second.

  Horseless

  So ingrained was the idea of horses as transportation that for some time after automobiles came along they were primarily known as horseless carriages. The combustion engine eventually replaced the horse, marking the end of not only an era, but a way of life for most of human history. (The first car to be powered by an internal combustion engine was designed and built by Karl Benz in 1885.)