Some time back, when Emily was at our house, she had some kind of soft drink that had random “facts” printed inside the lid. I happened to read one and it said, “A group of twelve or more cows is called a flink.” I had never heard this and in fact I’d never heard of the word “flink.”
I figured that, as usual, some of my extensive research might shed some light on the subject, but even after extensive research, the statement and the word flink remains a bit of a mystery.
I started with the dictionary — according to the Oxford English Dictionary, flink is a 19th century US rural dialect verb meaning “to behave in a cowardly manner.”
But if you check the Internet, flink is found all over the place, defined as “a group of twelve cows,” “at least twelve cows,” and so on. I found flink on a number of lists of collective animal nouns, like a “pod” of whales, “murder” of crows, etc.
Digging a bit further, I found that a book by Kay Pfaltz, “Lauren’s Story: An American Dog in Paris,” contained the following sentence on page 21 — “A flink is twelve or more cows.”
The word was mentioned on a web site about science for kids, that talked about making an object that neither floats on top of a container of water, nor sinks to the bottom, but hovers halfway up or down. The word used on the site is “flink.” It seems to have been created by combining FLoat and sINK into a single term. Actually that sounds like a good term to apply to “hovering in a liquid.” But nothing to do with cows…
Flink apparently means cleaver in Norwegian.
One google response to “what is a group of cattle called?” was…
A group of cattle is called a herd, mob, drift, drove or team. Historically, people who took cattle to market on the open range were known as drovers.
So basically, I couldn’t find any reliable source that ties “flink” to cows, but if that somehow is a legitimate term, I guess dairy farmers and cattle ranchers should be called flinkers…..
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