"Recalcitrant" is a word that originally meant to kick back such as a stubborn horse would sometimes do to his traces. Most of us now don't even know what traces are, but we understand the word means stubbornly defiant. When we say that something is curtailed we mean that it is cut short. Four hundred years ago this meant a bobtailed or curtal-tailed horse. A child who is out-of-sorts may be called sulky. He may just want to be left alone. The single-seated racing cart is known as a sulky for the same reason - the driver is of necessity left by himself.
"A horse canters lifting its fetlocks high. The rider gently draws back on the reins of the hackamore and brings the horse to a stop next to the field where the farmer is spreading manure."
After Thomas à Becket was murdered in the Canterbury Cathedral in 1170 many people made pilgrimages to pray at his shrine (remember Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?). It was believed that if you prayed at a shrine you would either be cured of a disease or get into heaven more easily. Some people rode horseback on these pilgrimages but few were in a hurry. The sight of these leisurely travellers was very common and their style of riding became known as the Canterbury pace later shortened to the Canterbury and finally to canter.
A small bunch of hair is sometimes called a lock (many a mother saves a lock of her baby's hair). Some people believe "fetlock" was originally "footlock" or the tuft of hair at the horse's foot.
A hackamore is a bitless bridle used by some western riders. Its name comes from the Americanization of the Spanish term for halter or headstall, jaquima.
"Manure" was originally a verb which came from the French word "manouvre". It meant to work by hand and later came to mean the stuff that is worked into the soil to make it fertile.
Several racing terms have come into our every day language. If a horse is excited and prancing when a race starts it will take off much more quickly than one standing with all four feet on the ground, hence to be caught flat-footed means to be slow on the uptake. A dark horse was originally a race horse about which nothing is known and everyone was kept in the dark. Harness races at county fairs years ago were difficult to get started because the jostling horses with inexperienced drivers would frequently get out of line. "Hold your horses!" the judges would cry to call a driver back. The idea behind the phrase was used even earlier in Homer's Iliad. A translation is "Antilochus - you drive like a maniac! Hold your horses!"
"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth" means to not examine a gift for defects (i.e. to see how old the horse is). Similar expressions can be found in French, Italian and Spanish. "Straight from the horse's mouth" means the person heard something from the best authority. When deciding to buy a horse the most reliable way to know the horse's age is to look in the horse's mouth at the tooth wear and not take the owner's word for it.
An mildly poisonous nut known as a horse chestnut has the botanical name Castanea equina, a direct translation. A sixteenth century writer tried to explain that the people in the Far East used the nut to cure a horse's cough. Another explanation is that "horse" merely indicates a large nut (like "horseradish" means a large member of the radish family) that looks like a chestnut. I don't think this holds much water either because a chestnut and a horse chestnut are about the same size. I don't think it has to do with what is called a chestnut on a horse's leg which is a callosed formation above the knee. That chestnut might be what is left of a vestigial toe or a vestigial scent gland. It is also called a night eye. Heaven only knows from where that term comes!
"Horse play" probably comes from the same meaning of "horse" as in horseradish. It means rough, rowdy play where someone is liable to get hurt.
I was talking with a friend about a relative who was ignoring a symptom that could lead to something serious and the phrase "You can lead a horse to water but cannot make him drink" came up. This expression was first written down in a sermon from 1175 and is pretty self-explanatory.
A little settlement in Shasta County, California was originally called Clear Creek Diggings in 1849. A gold miner might have felt that calling it a town was pretentious and referred to it as a "one horse town" meaning insignificant. The name stuck but was later shortened to Horsetown before it became a ghost town.
In the 1850's a lame race horse was called a Charley, so when a person is temporarily lamed by a muscle spasm in his calf (why are those muscles called a baby cow?), he is said to have a Charley horse.
In the 1780's working horses were not used for riding but rather were to pull plows or carts. The aristocracy used their leggy, high-strung horses for riding. If someone tells you to get off your high horse it means to quit behaving in such a superior manner.
Horses often raise their tails when they run away, so now I'm going to hightail it out of here!
My sister asked me about the word "horsefeathers", a term our aunt used. Good word! I just looked it up and found it first appeared in print in the "Barney Google" cartoon in the late 1920's and was a euphemism for horse poop.
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