cow, you

   This is now a generally contemptuous term for a woman one dislikes. In the nineteenth century it could have been taken to mean ‘you prostitute’. That specific meaning probably no longer applies, nor need there be a reference to the large size and slow movement of the woman so addressed, though ‘you fat cow’ is a fairly frequent collocation. ‘Cow’ seems to have become more offensive as the centuries have passed; it would not have been so insulting in the seventeenth century. It is, of course, normally used to a woman, but ‘Bring the gin, you enormous cow,’ in The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West, is spoken by a woman to a man. In Festival, by N.J. Crisp, a young woman admonishes herself as ‘you silly cow’. She is later addressed by a male colleague as ‘you stupid cow’. In A Kind of Loving, by Stan Barstow, ‘you old cow’ is spoken by a young man to his mother-in-law, but only after she has called him ‘you little upstart’ and ‘you filthy pig’. Up the City Road, by John Stroud, has a young husband calling his teenage wife ‘you great screaming cow’. She is larger than usual because she is in the late stages of pregnancy.