Word: cowed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...known as the Permian Basin developed in what would come to be known as West Texas. Then, to make a long story short (the demands here are somewhat more telescopic than those Big Jim labors under), there would be dinosaurs and much later there would be fossil fuels. Cow towns called Midland and Odessa would be established, their commercial cornerstones eventually to shift from cattle to the petroleum that lay beneath the desert pocked by what the Spanish speakers called playas and the English speakers called buffalo wallows. This would be known as the oil business, pronounced locally "thawlbidness...
Akoan for Action Man: What kind of expensive military hardware took its form, according to the bearer's whim, from a cow's head, a rice bowl, a pair of rabbit ears, a water plantain, a whirlpool, a pumpkin, a canyon, or the cone-shaped head of the God of Longevity? The answer is kaware kabuto, which translates from the Japanese as "conspicuous helmets." These were the singular headgear worn into battle, or during the formal maneuvers preceding it, by Japanese clan leaders, before the accurate, quick-firing arms of the 19th century rendered the helmets, their wearers...
Long fences now divide ranches that once ran over unbroken plains. Trailers haul horses from one job to another; those long treks in the saddle, sometimes upwards of 1,200 miles, are a thing of the past. Beef prices have plummeted. Notes Knox: "You sell a cow for $300; you got $600 in her. It's hard to make a living that way." With salaries ranging between $500 and $800 a month, cowboys don't get rich either, a fact that recently prompted Knox to move from solely punching cows to shoeing horses and doing daywork...
Most cowboy poems speak of real events and people, from bucking horses and cagey cows to old Stetson hats and long winter travels. Although they focus on the ordinary stuff of life, their truths, at least to cowboys, seem no less eternal than those penned by William Shakespeare. Some cowboy poems are bust-a-gut funny; a few are downright dirty. And some are just plain awful. But many carry an honest, primitive power, like these lines from Vern Mortensen's Range Cow in Winter...
...Eastern friends had apprehensions about--many of them quickly dismissed once they visited and fired a few rounds from the target pistols I own or took a pickup down to a local bar with a poker table in its back room--is setting like the evening sun. Ragged former cow towns like Bozeman are turning into suburbanized high-tech meccas for Ph.D.s who like to go rafting and snowboarding. These immigrants have brought with them an exotic culture of dining spots that feature formal wine lists, bookstores that sell titles besides the Bible, sports that don't center...