As part of my New Year effort to stave off the ravages of old age, I’ve started going to yoga classes. I booked in with my wife for a session called Warm Dynamic Flow, which sounded pretty soothing to me but wasn’t.
Nevertheless, I was determined not to fall at the first hurdle so I booked in again the next week, then learnt that my wife had other plans. So I went along alone, which, for a bloke, is quite daunting, I can tell you. Tip-toeing in a minute late, I rolled out my mat and had a quick look around me. I appeared to be in a class of twentysomething ballerinas, who spent most of the hour on their heads or effortlessly balancing on one toe, while I wobbled and grimaced and felt the burn in just about every muscle.
“I’m out of my depth,” I thought. “This hurts!”
That said, I began and ended well, and that’s half the battle, isn’t it? My closing “Namaste” was the most fulsome and enthusiastic in the class and I think the instructor noticed. I am learning the moves too. One that I’ve got down pat (no pun intended) is ‘cat and cow’, where you get on all fours and arch your back up and down, while miaowing and mooing alternately. (With regard to this last detail, I think I may have been the victim of a wind-up. No-one else in the room seemed to be doing it.)
Anyway, during this sequence I became mindful of the word cow and other words like cower and cowed and coward, and I wondered which came first, cow as in cow or cow as in the female of any large mammal (whale, elephant etc). The answer’s cow as in cow.
While the adjective cowed and the verb to cower are both associated with cowardice, they are unrelated in origin and only the first has anything to do with cows. Even that is speculative – something to do with being easily herded, they reckon. The verb to cower comes from an old German word meaning to lie in wait. So someone crouching behind a bush waiting to ambush a passer-by would be said to be cowering – a much more sinister meaning than the shrinking in fear that we use it to mean today.
Coward also has nothing to do with cows, unless you find cows scary or you’re referring to Noël Coward and his namesakes, whose surname is a derivation of ‘cow herd’. Or so they want us to think.
Similarly, cattle has nothing to do with cats, unless you happen to own one. It originally meant property (from the same origin as chattels), evolving to mean livestock and then, in the late 16th century, specifically cows and bulls.
Anyway, not wishing to be cowed into cowardice and cower away from the beneficial torture of yoga, I will be back again tomorrow but I don’t think I’ll be booking into the same class. I need to find an udder.
