A lock or tuft of hair growing in a different direction from the rest of the hair is called a cowlick. Most authors agree with the major dictionaries that the reason for this expression is that the flock looks like an ox licking it.
But why a cow? Why not a cat or a dog or a horse? Cats, dogs, and horses also like to lick. They lick themselves, their puppies, and even nearby humans.
The exact origin of the expression cowlick is buried in the linguistic past. However, it may be hinted at in Norse mythology. Before the beginning of the world, the primordial divine cow Audumbla licked blocks of ice with cosmic salt, and while she licked, the hair of a man appeared; when he continued to lick, the man’s head, and finally the rest of his body, was revealed. Thus he gave the bull to the ancestor Buri. Notice the first part of the body that the cow licks the hair. This story was recorded in the early 1200s (by Snorri Sturluson), but, of course, the story itself probably goes back much further in time, and may have influenced the common linguistic image of other Europeans.
The word cowlick was in common use in England at least as early as 1598. In that year Richard Haydocke published his English version of a painting by G.P. Published by an Italian writer in 1584. Lomazzo, which has this: “The blue or flat hairs of the hairs, which are called vaccinia, are made upwards.” And so the image of the cowlick was also known in Italian. A passage is cited in the Oxford Dictionary, which defines cowlick as “a curling or a mane of hair which looks as if it had been licked by an ox.
In British English slings, butchers (who sold meat from barrels, 1500s to 1800s) used the word cowlick for hair that was greased, curled, pulled from the ear, and plastered. the cheeks, as if they were being licked on the tongue of an ox. That sense of the word has been recorded since at least the 1800s, but its street usage began much earlier.
In the dialect of British English, cowlick, also recorded by at least the 1800s, meant cain hair. he did not want to lie flat on his own cowhide. This condition is believed to be caused by “an animal constantly licking” hair ( English Dictionary< /i>, 1898).
Early linguists in the United States mentioned similar definitions. Noah Webster, in his dictionary of 1818, defined cowlick as “a hairy lick that was licked by a cow.”
Another sentence proposed by some linguists is cowlick in the way that a cow eats. A cow has thirty-two teeth: the front eight in the lower front jaw and six molars on both sides of the top and bottom (for a total of twenty-four). In the upper part of the jaw there is a cushion of cartilage, not incised teeth. In order to eat the grass, the cow must grab the banks, turn its head, pick the grass. In this way of eating, the cattle cannot feed as close to the ground as other animals. The rough shape left by a cow’s “bite” is said by some to be the source of the cowlick shape.
However, the history of the phrase, from its origins in Norse mythology to its use in both British English (standard, slang, and dialect) and American English, shows that it is the tongue of a cow to lick which introduced the sense of the figure cowlick.
(Primary sources: Oxford Dictionary; Darryl Lyman, Dictionary of Animal Words and Phrases, Jonathan David Publishers, www.jdbooks.com)
