Holy Cow!

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Emily. I am in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Welcome, Emily. What can we do for you?

Yeah, we were listening to the segment on PR and we heard you guys talking about the phrases and there were a bunch of cows.

We were on a long cross-country road trip and we saw all these windmills and I was like, oh, holy cow, you know.

And my friend Isabel, co-pilot, was like, oh, yeah, I wonder what that comes from.

And so we had the right idea to call you guys. We’re curious.

Where does the phrase holy cow come from?

Do you have guesses?

I mean, of course, I assume it’s some type of religious thing.

I’m pretty sure in India, the cow is seen like as a holy animal.

But that’s the biggest guess I’ve got.

Yeah, that’s it.

And that’s usually what people suspect, but they don’t know the details.

The story here is fairly straightforward. Holy cow became an expression of surprise or delight by the early 1900s and was often associated with sports, especially baseball.

And that continued for a long time.

Some of our listeners will definitely remember Phil Rizzuto or Harry Coray using holy cow when they were doing baseball’s play-by-play.

But originally what it started out as was a kind of a complicated minced oath, as they’re called, where to avoid swearing or saying Jesus or God or Lord or Christ, you say something else with the same emphatic force.

So you kind of get the relief of almost cursing without actually cursing.

And that last word, Christ, is what’s happening here.

Holy cow is a way of saying holy Christ without saying Christ.

And it just so happens because bovines are sacred in Hinduism, you have that extra meaning there.

But it didn’t require that the Hinduism connection exists for holy cow to have its own life as an exclamation, just like holy Moses or holy smoke.

Okay.

That makes sense then.

Yeah, and there was, surprisingly, although it was never all that common, using cow, just the word cow alone as an exclamation,

Substituting for the word God goes back to the 1860s, even before we know holy cow in print.

So that already existed, just a way of, again, suggesting God without saying God.

Cow.

It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?

Yeah, I did not know that that was like another reference for God.

That’s interesting.

Oh, there are so many of these minst oaths.

I think if you search our website, you’ll probably come up with a good dozen or more segments of the show

Where we’ve talked about all the different ways we do mild swearing without actually offending anyone.

Right, that’s perfect.

Is that how you do it, Emily?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I was the one in the car screaming, holy cow.

Well, Emily, happy travels.

Yeah, happy travels.

Call us again sometime.

Okay, thanks so much, you guys.

Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.

You too, bye.

Well, we’d be delighted if you called us, 877-929-9673.