The other day in the car, Jeff and I were talking about my gym (it comes up frequently, since I'm obsessed with my gym). My gym is a part of a chain called Maverick's. When I mentioned this, Jeff chuckled to himself and then said that the naming is ironic because a maverick is a cow.
I responded by thinking to myself that he didn't know what he was talking about, as I often do. I then thought to myself that a maverick is someone who is independent, or someone who does things in a unique, individual way -- not a cow, silly Jeff. Something on my face must have told him that I was thinking these things, because he then pointed out that the pilots in the movie Top Gun all make fun of Tom Cruise's character for naming himself after a cow. I don't remember that part of the movie (I think my young, impressionable mind was too distracted by the volleyball scenes), so I continued to think to myself that he didn't know what he was talking about and we drove peacefully on.*
Today, after using the word in an email to an author, I decided to look it up. Jeff was right and I am impressed.
The word comes from the name of an early American pioneer who did not brand his calves, Samuel A. Maverick. The first definition given in Webster's is, "an unbranded range animal; a motherless calf." The second definition is the one I was thinking of, "an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party."
*I've been working on being less argumentative lately. A big part of being less argumentative seems to be not pushing things that don't matter that much.
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5 comments:
All I know about cattle is I like to eat it.
For more on cows, see
Shrum v. Zeltwanger 559 P.2d 1384
That's so screwed up. Do you think the marketing folks at our gym know that and are preying on our fears of "feeling like a cow"?
But I, too, am impressed my Jeff's wide-ranging knowledge.
RB, I don't remember that part of Top Gun either, and I can't find any mention of it on the interweb neither. Can you get confirmation on the Maverick/Cow/Top Gun connection?
Okay, I asked Jeff and he said that they never say anything outright about cattle in the movie. But they do make jokes to Maverick about his mom abandoning him, or something like that? When Jeff was little and watching the movie he asked his mom what they were talking about and SHE was the one who knew that a maverick was an unbranded or motherless calf.
see also:
SHERWOOD v. WALKER, 66 Mich. 568, 33 N.W. 919, where the Michigan Supreme Court determined that a barren cow is a substantially different creature than a breeding cow.
http://www.west.net/~smith/Sherwood_v_Walker.htm
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