(How old were you when you learned that a violin and a fiddle are the same instrument? I may have been an adult already.) Or it’s like saying you’ve seen donkey, but never an… hmm, no, let’s skip that one. But in another sense, it’s like saying you’ve seen plenty of fiddles but never a violin, or vice versa. Zero times.) And in one sense of the word that’s true: I had never personally seen a bovine used as a draft animal, and that’s the narrowest sense of the use of ox in modern English (more specifically, it’s a neutered male Bos taurus used as such).
So I really thought I had seen a real live ox zero times. The famous university is in a town named after a place where oxen could ford the river Thames.) And of course an ox is something from the Bible: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his ox, nor his ass.” And indirectly it’s true: it’s from the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, so the fam is from famine, and the Ox in Oxford is from… ox. Isn’t that how Oxfam got its name, from oxen and famine? (I actually believed that for a time.
I grew up in ranch country in Alberta and I knew that oxen were somehow like the cows and bulls (and steers) that punctuated the pastures, but I had the sense that they were an animal found elsewhere – those parts of the world I saw on TV that had oxen pulling plows, trying to grow crops in a time of poverty and famine. Ox is a word that, for many of us, is both familiar and strange. “Why is it called oxtail if it’s from a cow?”
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