Following up on previous posts that I've written on variation in terms for animals as evidenced in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR) (see, for example, orphan lambs and dogs of mixed breed), here I present variants that LAMR informants offered in response to the following question: Do you know of any terms for poor livestock that are used in this area?

Fig. 1: Range of terms for poor livestock in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (Lamont Antieau, wordwatching.org)

As the figure illustrates, the distribution of terms given in response to the poor livestock question is that of an asymptotic curve, headed by cull(s), which is followed by the lower-ranked scrub(s), followed by several twofers, and then a long tail comprising numerous hapax legomena, or oncers. In general, there were few attempts by LAMR fieldworkers to determine if informants applied different names to different types of livestock; rather, if they didn't provide a generic response for all livestock, informants usually provided answers to the animals they were more familiar with, so that if they lived in sheep country, they gave answers like old ewe, and if they lived in cattle country, they provided terms like cull cattle.

Some of the terms in the list are worth noting individually. Cull is a noun derived from a verb that generally means 'to select or gather', but in ranching typically means 'to take out an inferior member of a herd'. Thus, the animal that is culled is referred to as a cull, by a common word-formation process in English known as conversion (or functional shift or zero-derivation), which is a change in part of speech (e.g. verb to noun) with no surface change to the word undergoing the conversion. Another variant that appears is scrub(s), which is used in reference to the observation that underfed cattle were often so because of their environment, depending on wooded areas, or "scrub land", rather than green pastures for their grazing. Finally, there is shelly, which is used to describe the shell-like appearance of the animal (and always reminds me of the intro to "Road Warrior" [1981] and its reference to Mad Max becoming "a shell of a man"), a word that, again, undergoes conversion (from adjective to noun) to become a variant term for poor livestock.

Several of the oncers also have interesting backstories. If you'd like to hear more about them, drop me a line.

For a word search that consists of variants of poor livestock in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies, click here.

Thanks for the folks at Illocution Inc for making this research possible.

Donate