Animal Based Metaphors
about Growing Old
by
Alleen Pace Nilsen
Don L. F. Nilsen
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Animal-Based Metaphors are Visible Evidence
of Human Attitudes towards Gender
• Species are valued differently based on their
gender.
• With farm animals, the female is usually
more valued than the male because females
reproduce the species as well as furnish
eggs or milk.
• This value-plus is reflected in language by
the way people use the female term as the
generic species name.
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• Goose, for example, is used as the generic species name:
a goose down comforter
goose bumps
goose pimples
goose egg score
goose step (march)
to goose an engine
goose neck lamp
silly goose
• The honking of geese was a familiar sound long before the
honking of cars.
• Mother Goose rhymes got their name from the old women who
used to “herd” geese and at the same time entertain children
with stories and poems.
• The male term of gander is seldom heard except in “What’s
sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander,” and “to take a
gander,” which is an aimless walkabout.
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• Peacock is one of the few barnyard animals where
the male’s name is used as the generic term.
• This is because the male is the one with the beautiful
feathers, and peacocks are valued not for their eggs
or their meat, but because of their beauty.
• When Alleen’s students wrote sample sentences
using a variety of animal names, the students
alluded to females more often than to males in such
sentences as:
She’s as colorful as a peacock!
She struts like a peacock.
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Animal Names as Value
Metaphors
• Some animal allusions are based on simple
comparisons to shape or appearance, but others
allude to behaviors and reveal speakers’ attitudes
towards males and females.
• For example, a comparison of how much more
valued is the brilliant male peacock compared to the
drab peahen, makes it easier to see why women
resent being told that they are included in the
masculine pronouns of he and his and in these socalled “generic masculine” nouns: mankind, man on
the street, chairman, man-made, the best man for the
job, and the common man.
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Three Extreme Archetypes
• With animals that are not so common or “intimate”
with humans, speakers do not have names marked
for gender. We just say things like “a mother bird,”
or “a male swan.”
• But some archetypes are so firmly set in our minds
that we have given female-sounding names to the
whole species. Teachers have to explain to children
that there are male, as well as female,
Black widow spiders
Lady bugs
Sea Cows (also called manatees, from Spanish)
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AGE-RELATED ANIMAL TERMS
Many animal terms are positive when based on young animals,
but negative when based on old or middle-aged animals, e.g.
• Playboy bunnies
• A bird
• A filly or being
frisky as a colt
• A lamb
vs. *Playboy rabbits.
vs. an old crow or an old bat.
vs. an old nag
vs. an old crone
Note that old men refer to their buddies as their cronies. One
dictionary says this might come from chronos related to time,
but since the h is missing, we suspect that it is a jocular way
for men to insult their friends in a similar way to when fussy old
men are referred to as old maids or old hens.
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FROM CHICK TO OLD BIDDY
• As soon as a girl is too old to be called a chick,
she goes to hen parties and cackles with her
friends. When she marries, she feathers her
nest, but after she has her brood, she begins
feeling cooped up and wonders if she made a
mistake by putting all her eggs in one basket.
Finally she begins to henpeck her husband and
turns into an old biddy.
• An especially mean-spirited comparison of
women to chickens appeared during the 2008
presidential campaign. Pundits created a friedchicken Hillary Meal Deal mug: “Two fat thighs,
two small breasts, and a bunch of left wings.”
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•
In the mid-1800s, English speakers in America
decided to “gentrify” their language. They changed
the word cock to rooster. As part of this, Louisa
May Alcott’s father changed the family name from
Alcox to Alcott.
•
Refined people began referring to light meat vs.
dark meat so at the table people would not need to
ask for a leg or a breast.
•
But that we still describe assertive people as cocky
and have such phrases as cocking a gun and the
cock of the walk, show how much easier it is to
bring in new usages than to remove old ones.
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From Sex Kitten to Cougar
• Parents used to name little girls, Kitty, and encourage them to
act kittenish, at least with the opposite sex.
• Older girls were more likely to become catty, and to engage in
cat fights or live in cat houses.
• Puss, an alternate name for cats (and vaginas), is cognate with
pouch and purse. It’s connection to sexuality was shown in
one of the James Bond films about Pussy Galore and Her
Flying Felines.
• The most recent cat-related term to come into general use is
the word cougar for an older woman who goes “prowling for
young men.” Whether cougar is a positive or a negative term
differs as shown by how a recent Arizona incident was treated
in the media.
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DON’T FORGET ABOUT
HORNY OLD MEN?
• While there aren’t as many negative animal
metaphors about men, men too suffer from growing
old.
• Just think about what happens to a player on the Los
Angeles Rams football team. He is so loved by LA
fans, that they buy him a Dodge Ram truck, which he
is careful not to use as a battering ram. He has
inherited his grandfather’s Civil War ramrod muzzle
and while he stands ramrod straight on the football
field, he tries not to ram his ideas down the throats
of his friends. Nevertheless, he eventually turns into
an old goat, otherwise known as a horny old man.
He gets the name even if he doesn’t have a goatee.
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• We’ll open this up for discussion by
citing the relatively new animal-based
metaphor. Thanks to Sarah Palin, the
“Soccer Moms” of the 2008 election
became the “Mama Grizzlies” of the
2010 election.
• What do you think this shows both
about language and culture?
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