Some time back, when Emily was at our house, she had some kind of soft drink that had random \u201cfacts\u201d printed inside the lid. I happened to read one and it said, \u201cA group of twelve or more cows is called a flink.\u201d I had never heard this and in fact I\u2019d never heard of the word \u201cflink.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I started with the dictionary \u2014 according to the Oxford English Dictionary, flink is a 19th century US rural dialect verb meaning \u201cto behave in a cowardly manner.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if you check the Internet, flink is found all over the place, defined as \u201ca group of twelve cows,\u201d \u201cat least twelve cows,\u201d and so on. I found flink on a number of lists of collective animal nouns, like a \u201cpod\u201d of whales, \u201cmurder\u201d of crows, etc. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Digging a bit further, I found that a book by Kay Pfaltz, \u201cLauren\u2019s Story: An American Dog in Paris,\u201d contained the following sentence on page 21 \u2014 \u201cA flink is twelve or more cows.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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 \u201cflink.\u201d 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 \u201chovering in a liquid.\u201d But nothing to do with cows\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Flink apparently means cleaver in Norwegian.\u00a0
One google response to \u201cwhat is a group of cattle called?\u201d was\u2026
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So basically, I couldn\u2019t find any reliable source that ties \u201cflink\u201d to cows, but if that somehow is a legitimate term, I guess dairy farmers and cattle ranchers should be called flinkers\u2026..
\u2014 30 \u2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some time back, when Emily was at our house, she had some kind of soft drink that had random \u201cfacts\u201d printed inside the lid. I happened to read one and it said, \u201cA group of twelve or more cows is … Continue reading