By the Great Horned Spoon!

[Mark.Mandel at LHSL.COM]

Jim Landau commented:

>I think the correct expression is "...the great horn spoon" and presumably
>dates from a time when spoons were made from animal horns.

and Doug Wilson expanded:
>>>>>
That's right. The expression appears in DARE and in Mathews. It is
sometimes said to have been nautical slang, which might favor Jim Landau's
theory. The *great* horn spoon might be Ursa Major.
<<<<<

That's what I decided (unauthoritatively) after first encountering the
expression in one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" books, while
reading it to my children. (Not the TV series. *Never* the TV series!)
Laura's family gets a cow -- iirc, their neighbors are leaving and can't
take the cow with them, so they give her to the Wilders -- but when Pa
tries to milk her she kicks him. Pa gets mad and vows, "Now, by the Great
Horn Spoon, I'll milk her!" (And he does.)

I *think* that swearing by Ursa Major is attested in other Indo-European
languages -- any info out there? And ISTR seeing something like it in the
_Kalevala_, which of course is Finnish and not Indo-European, but also from
a Northern culture where Ursa Major is in the sky every night. Of course,
swearing by a spoon made from a cow's horn would be particularly
appropriate in Pa's circumstance!

>>>>>
However "the horn"
apparently was once a name of Ursa Minor, also (an abbreviated equivalent
of "horn-spoon"?). Or the oath could have been a euphemism based on an
earlier impolite exclamation with "horn" = "erect penis" or "hornie" = "the
Devil".
<<<<<

I'm sure that Pa, or at least Laura, was not aware of any such association,
or she wouldn't have quoted him so.

>>>>>
There are several instances in "Harrington", by William Douglas O'Connor
(1860), at MoA (books) (Michigan).
<<<<<

Laura's account was set in the 1880s.

                  Mark A. Mandel : Senior Linguist
 Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company : speech recognition
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com