Hi all ...
We all hear it all the time ... I say it to my kids ... "You can keep asking 'til the cows come home, but you're not getting any ice cream!"
"Until the cows come home," to my understanding, means some distant point in the indefinite, far-off future.
But, growing up in Wisconsin, even though I'm not a farmer, I know that the cows come home pretty much every day at about 5 in the afternoon.
So, where does this phrase originate, and how does one explain that seeming inconsistency?
Thank you!
Rob
LOL, Rob! Good point about the bovines returning before sunset. It's always more difficult, etymologically, to trace phrases rather than individual words, but I suppose I've always assumed that the reference here is to, as they say so often in bizspeak, "at the end of the day" -- i.e., more metaphorical than anything else.
What do you think about that?
"Till the cows come home" reminds me of the Indian Indian (that is, Subcontinental or East Indian) expression cow-dust hour or cow-dust time. It means "dusk, twilight, or the end of the working day."
So it means "until the end of the day," you think? My sense always was that it was far more indefinite into some distant point in the future; as in, it'll never happen. When pigs fly kind of thing. But I suppose it does make sense that the phrase might begin as "until the end of the day" and expand and become exaggerated in its sense. Thanks!
I think it means "indefinitely," and not "the end of the day." The Briticism "the end of the day" means "when all is said and done."