As Horse Network’s resident #horsewordnerd and a holder of copious amounts of useless information, I’m compelled to find meaning in whatever I like, frankly.

Late one night while trying to sleep, three words popped into my head, which has landed us here, on the topic of weird words. The horse industry is full of them but today I shall zero in on these three.

Numnah

Numnah. It’s a fun word to say. My friend called her dog Numnah just so she could yell the word out at horse shows.

It’s also a word we don’t often use anymore, which made the name all the more fun. I think a resurgence is in order; it would be a shame for the younger generation to miss out on it.

A numnah is of course a saddle pad and, according to my 1976 Pony Club Manual of Horsemanship, they are made of felt, sheepskin, nylon, Sorbo rubber (which is a spongy form of rubber; I had to look that up) and leather, which seems a strange material for a saddle pad. Nonetheless, Pony Club calls the shots and I suspect if I had a PC manual from this century, I wouldn’t find leather on the list. 

The word numnah comes from the Urdu word namdā, meaning felt pad.

The British Indian Army likely picked the word up in the early 1900s and brought it back to the Continent, though in the form of numdah and over time it morphed into numnah.

I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s book The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way and now feel empowered to go out on a limb. Bryson, or Bill as I call him (in my head), taught me that since we listen far faster than we speak and tend to get lazy when speaking, we morph words from one sound to another. Since numdah is harder to say than numnah, we likely changed it for ease of speech. And that, folks, is why I believe we now have the word numnah instead of numdah or namdā. This is not peer-reviewed information, just a half-educated guess.

Ermine

Ermine, it’s a strange word, at least to me.

According to the FEI, “black spots in a white coronet are referred to as Ermine marks.” Though the wording of that quote seems a little off, it’s interesting to note that those black dots within your horse’s white sock are only called ermines if they are touching the coronet band. Otherwise, they are just spots.

The ermine even has the power to change the color of the hoof below it.

There is a weaselly animal called an ermine, and it is here, in part, where the name for the spots is derived. In the winter, our little weasel friends are white, and in the summer, they are brown with white pants. Their tail, on the other hand, is always black. The black tail is thought to be a decoy to fool those pesky birds of prey, as they will spot a black twitching meal in the undergrowth and swoop in for the kill. As the talons wrap around the tail, the little ermine has an opportunity, albeit slim, to escape.  

I bring up this little black tail because the equine ermine hinges on this detail.

You may have noticed royals of all centuries wearing furry robes and capes peppered with black dots. That is ermine. The black is sewn in separately and is added for flare, apparently. These garments stand for valor, justice and dignity, and while I love the Queen, I sincerely hope she now drapes herself in a polyester blend faux fur.

Speaking of Her Majesty, a coronet is a small crown or an ornamental wreath for the head, so says my Penguin dictionary. Sometimes, however, we call it the coronary band, and though my trusty dictionary was unable to supply me with that term, the definition for coronary has us treading away from the heads of royals and venturing closer to blood supply, which, as it happens, is the point of the coronary band.

The word ermine is old, and its origins are thought to be an amalgamation of words (I will spare you the list) from Old High German, Old Saxon and Old English. At the latter end of the 12th century, Old French bestowed us with the word as we know it today.

The one outstanding question I was unable to answer is, why does the spot have to touch the coronet band to be called an ermine?

Ergot

Ergot, another strange word, but no less interesting.

The ergot is that weird protuberance on the back of the fetlock. I have to say, looking up the ergot produced a great deal of unsupported information, and it took some time before I came across a short article written by the knowledgeable people at Kentucky Equine Research.

Even this, however, produced scant details. Basically, ergots are the rudimentary remanence of metacarpal and metatarsal pads leftover from the horse’s origin, which was a creature with more than one toe. This is why horses are distantly related to rhinos and tapirs. Horses, rhinos and tapirs are biologically grouped as odd-toed ungulates, which means they have one or three toes or hooves. Even-toed ungulates are animals like cows, pigs and sheep.

Chestnuts, that rough flakey tissue found on the inside of a horse’s legs above the knees and below the hocks are more obvious leftover carpal and tarsal foot pads from eons ago.

Like the ermine, FEI looks to chestnuts as identifying marks, as they are unique to each horse like fingerprints are to us. Curiously, zebras and African wild asses don’t have chestnuts on their hind legs.

Now, the word comes from 12th century Old French, argot, meaning cock’s spur, and by the 1600s the word changed to ergot. There are also ergot alkaloids that can infect a wide variety of grasses, and that fungus is known as an ergot due to its spur shape. These ergot alkaloids are also used in therapeutic medication and hallucinogenic drugs.

Three wonderfully weird words made all the more interesting now that we know the history and mystery behind them.

Sources:

Tweet
Pin2
Share
2 Shares