ox

   The vocative meaning of ‘ox’ has changed through the centuries. In the seventeenth century it meant a fool, as Shakespeare indicates in The Merry Wives of Windsor (5:v), where Falstaff says: ‘I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass.’ ‘Ay,’ says Ford, ‘and an ox too.’ At the end of the century we find a character in William Congreve’s The Double Dealer (1694) calling another man ‘fool, sot, insensible ox’.

   Modern use of ‘ox’, applied to a person, implies both stupidity and sluggishness of movement, usually of a large person. The word usually collocates with ‘dumb’, as in Frank Yerby’s A Woman Called Fancy, where a woman says to a man: ‘She’s not lying! Can’t you see that, you big, dumb ox?’