keep a cow

[Jonathan Lighter]

My grandfather also used to say, "Tell him to go chase himself !"

The phrase is very well attested in print. (See HDAS. Buy one if possible.)

What he did not say was "Go fuck yourself."  IIRC, John Dos Passos was the first to put this in print, with ref. (again, if IIRC) to WW I.

JL

Roger Shuy <rshuy at MONTANA.COM> wrote:
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Poster: Roger Shuy
Subject: Re: =?ISO-8859-1?B?oCCgIKA=?= keep a cow
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on 4/23/05 9:58 AM, RonButters at AOL.COM at RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:

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> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: RonButters at AOL.COM
> Subject: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Re:=20=A0=20=A0=20=A0=20keep=20a=20cow?=
>
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> In a message dated 4/23/05 9:51:30 AM, rshuy at MONTANA.COM writes:
>
>
>> My late father, who would be 101 now if he were still alive, used some
>> expressions that I've not heard from others. I wonder if any one else has
>> heard the expression of disgust said to someone else, "Oh, go keep a cow."
>> He lived all his life in central to northern Ohio.
>>
>> Roger
>>
>
> This seems to me to mean the same thing as "Oh, go fly a kite," which was
> very common in east-central Iowa in the 1950s. "Oh, go keep a cow" sounds
> vaguely
> familiar, but I can't say for sure that any of my grandparents used it (or
> didn't).
>
He also used to say, "Go chase yourself" and I wonder if he was alone in
this too.

roger

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