The Wild West

The Wild West

When you hear words like ‘cowboy’, most people will immediately conjure up images from the old Western movies, of rough, tough and handsome men, who shoot first and ask questions later, before riding off into the sunset with their ‘gal’ by their side. It shouldn’t surprise you too much to learn that real life in the old West was nothing like it was portrayed on the silver screen, and the words used along with the demographics of the time were not accurately portrayed by the movies. For instance, believe it or not, the word cowboy did not originate in the USA. Despite its modern implications of sage-brush, cactus and the high chapparal, cowboy was first used in England in the 1620s. There is, however, a genuinely American equivalent and that is cow-hand, a word from the 1850s.

Another fact that might surprise you (particularly if you have seen the iconic movie Blazing Saddles, which was both a tribute to, and a mocking of (among other things), old Westerns) is that most cowboys were Mexican and, of the remainder, a large proportion was African-American, so were largely dark skinned rather than the white heroes shown. In fact, two entire regiments of the western US Cavalry were African-American – the legendary “buffalo soldiers”. The Mexican contribution to cowboy culture is readily apparent when we examine some of its terminology. What word is more redolent of the “Wild West” than buckaroo? Yet buckaroo (first recorded in 1827) is merely a mispronunciation of the Spanish vaquero (literally “cow-man”, ultimately from Latin vacca, “a cow”). Anyone who ropes broncos with a lariat and pens them in a corral should be aware of their debt to the Spanish language. Bronco (1850) is the English spelling of broncho, Mexican Spanish for “wild” or “rough”.   A lariat is really la reata, “the lasso”, from the Spanish verb reatar, “to tie together”, from the Latin aptare, “to fit”. Strangely, the word corral, though Spanish, does not really belong with these others as it entered English much earlier (in 1582) and in a different context (it meant a place for parking vehicles, from Latin currus, “a cart”).

The word boy as part of cowboy might seem to be somewhat derogatory, with the generally accepted meaning now being “a male child”; however that wasn’t its first meaning. As one might expect, it is a pretty old word (1200s) and originally meant “a male servant”. Curiously, there are two other words from the same period which also meant “male servant” and which have suffered radically different fates. One is the dishonorable knave (from the Old English cnafa, “servant”) and the other is the noble knight (Old English cniht, “boy”, “servant”). A similar process has affected the word maid (1200s) which now mainly means maid-servant (first used in the 1300s) but was originally maiden (1100s) meaning “girl” and comes from the Old English mægden. While maid came to be reserved for servants, maiden took on the restricted meaning of “virgin” and is scarcely heard nowadays except in expressions which imply some kind of virginity,  maiden voyage and maiden speech, for example. A virgin’s maidenhead is therefore literally her girl-ness, just as godhead means “god-ness” or “divinity”.

Above: A bunch of lads, who are also Maidens (derivative work: Javatyk (talk)Iron_Maiden_in_Bercy_1.jpg: Metalheart, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

So if boy was the word for a servant, what did they call a male child? Well one word was ladde, the ancestor of our lad. And just as if this boy-servant business wasn’t confusing enough, the word girl (1300s) once meant “a child of either sex”, and child (1100s) originally meant “an unborn baby” or, in some dialects, “a female infant”. Thus, a Middle English speaker could say “I am the mother of two girls: a child and a lad who is the king’s boy” and mean “I am the mother of two children: a small girl and a boy who is the king’s servant”.

Latin did not distinguish between “nephew” and “grandson”, using the word nepos for both. The same applied to the concepts “niece” and “granddaughter” which shared the Latin word neptia. This word provided us (eventually) with our word niece but in Middle English it could still mean either “daughter of a sibling” or “grandchild”. We may think it incredibly strange to confuse two such different meanings but just think, we use the word aunt to mean both “the sister of a parent” and “the wife of an uncle”.  Come to think of it, the word cow does double duty, too. A cow (Middle English cou, from Old English cu; compare Old High German kuo and Sanskrit go) means both “a mature female of cattle (genus Bos)” and “a domestic bovine animal regardless of sex or age”. One who herds cows is, of course, a cow-herd. This word is the origin of the surname Coward (also Howard) but the coward who lacks courage is no relation. This 13th century word comes from the Old French coart, literally “one who shows his tail”, from Old French coe “tail” (Latin cauda, “a tail”).

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