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Ox

sesquiotic.com

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Fun. But missing references to the other well known but never used variety - the heifer.

You know, as you drive through Montana and you say, "wow, what a cute heifer there, next to that ox".

(And the driver forgets to steer)

OT: I was standing next a few freely roaming cows last week, and I was reminded just how awesomely huge and powerful these animals are.

I have never seen a `matador`, but it blows my mind that he doesn't become `a door mat` instead, after a run in with the bull.

Kudos for matching the wit and puns of the original article!

They are indeed huge and powerful. If you find yourself walking through a pasture full of cattle, they may approach you because domesticated cattle associate humans with food. They won't want to eat you but they might think you have some yummy alfalfa pellets in your pocket.

They tend to be gentle animals except for the bulls. Don't wander into a pasture with a bull. Fortunately bulls are quite easy to identify when you know where to look :-)

In the word "aurochs", the "aur" prefix is the same as German "ur" indicating beginning or origin.

(To beer drinkers around the world it may be familiar in the name of Pilsner Urquell, the original pale lager. Quell means source.)

So aurochs is literally "original ox". I don't think there is any other English word that preserves this prefix.

Auroa/Aurora, Auricle, Auriferous, Auriscope, Auroral, Aurum, Auspicious.

I don't think any of these are directly derived from the German "ur" like aurochs is.

Aurora / aurum come from Greek. Auricle and a few others are from Latin auris, ear. Auspicious comes from Latin "auspex" (bird seer) so the root is avis, bird.

They don't preserve it, but there's various modern academic words that use it, like urtext (sometimes with a hyphen)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/urtext#English

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ur-#Derived_terms

Though those academic words are often loan words from German where the ur- prefix is still very much in use (urtext and urheimat in particular)

I hoped to see a paragraph on hexadecimal notation (eg: 0xbeef), alas we'll have to settle for Stack Overflow's [1] wisdom on this:

> Short story: the 0 tells the parser it's dealing with a constant (and not an identifier/reserved word). Something is still needed to specify the number base: the x is an arbitrary choice.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2670639/why-are-hexadeci...

Lest we forget our lore: 0xDEADBEEF and (based on a true story!) 0xCAFEBABE.

Or every vegetarian/vegan's favourite: 0xdeadf00d15baad

There's the BEEF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak

The answer gives no evidence that the "x" is truly arbitrary and I am not inclined to believe it. "x" is one of the letters of "hexadecimal" and the letter-name sounds very much like "hex". Are we supposed to believe that Thompson or Kernighan or whoever it was picked a random letter of the alphabet and it just happened to be one of the two letters ("h" would be the other) with an obvious mnemonic connection to "hex"/"hexadecimal"?

*Steak Overflow

See also bullock where the ock is diminutive. And possibly more directly related to ox than https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ox#Etymology_1 suggests.

> we rarely use kine for the plural of cow,

Also possibly related, boelekijn from Middle Dutch.

While I understand this article is primarily meant to be comedic, the statement regarding slaughter rates is somewhat misleading. Roughly 50% of beef is from steers (gelded bulls). Heifers (cows never bred, not mentioned in the article) coming in at a close second near 30%. Cows make up 20% (roughly evenly split between dairy and non-dairy), and bulls are the rest.

Steers are preferred because they dress out nearly 70 lbs over heifers on average. They also beat bulls on average while being much more mild mannered, so it's worth the effort of gelding.

USDA publishes periodic reports on "Livestock Slaughter" if you would like more details.

Thank you for the excellent light hearted, tongue-in-cheek, and informative article!

It's a bit like poems in Alice in Wonderland, where the language and not the content is the point, but about the real world.

I wouldn't rely on the information being useful or accurate. It's mostly bollox.

For even deeper etymological Oxen, see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph#Origin

> The name aleph is derived from the West Semitic word for "ox" (as in the Biblical Hebrew word Eleph (אֶלֶף) 'ox'), and the shape of the letter derives from a Proto-Sinaitic glyph that may have been based on an Egyptian hieroglyph, which depicts an ox's head.

Am I the only one for whom the "Bitstream Charter" font family on this page causes the text to be mostly invisible (except for some punctuation characters)?

System Information: "Bitstream Charter" is installed; Georgia is not installed; Happens in Firefox, but not in Chromium; Arch Linux

Same here (Firefox, Linux). Strangely, when I took a screenshot with Firefox's built-in tool, the text was visible in the image.

Thanks for the confirmation. The screenshot behavior is very weird indeed.

I say pictures of cattle mean “oxox” or “oxen” like pictures of Tom Hanks mean “thanks.”

That was such a joy to read. But then, I have a strange fascination with etymology.

Only "oxen", "children", "brethren" ? What about "VAXen" ?

> What about "VAXen"?

That’s the utter ox.

Also “boxen”: https://foldoc.org/boxen

> Oxen is the sole surviving old weak plural ending in -en

I had heard that -en was a surviving "dual" suffix, I think in some presentation from Larry Wall (regexen anyone?)

Given oxen were often used in pairs, the dual form survived.

Alas I'm no linguist so I can't confirm this.

I don't know, Dutch is quite close to English (especially regarding these "weird" English plurals, like child/children and kind/kinderen, cow/kine and koe/koien, ox/oxen and os/ossen) and it also has these two plural endings, -s and -(e)n, but they depend mostly on the word ending (with many exceptions) not on meaning.

Regarding another note from the article, Dutch also has the "double" plural for child/children with kind/kinderen. As the cases became less and less used, "-er" stopped being seen as plural so people naturally added -en to it to make it plural. A bit like if people started saying "ox/oxens" in English because "oxen" doesn't feel plural enough.

Brethren. Brothers don't always come in pairs. I think Wall is mistaken.

> How old were you when you learned that a violin and a fiddle are the same instrument?

Today!

Happy 'learning that violin and fiddle are the same' day X

Violin players use catgut; fiddle players use the whole damn cat.

In turkic langs we have öküz/өгіз and likes, and they indeed mean ox.

Is what?

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