Word: cowyard
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...school opened two years later, bolstered by a contribution of 779 pounds from John Harvard. It began as a farm-house in the middle of Cowyard Row (now the Yard), and steam and smells from cow manure regularly wafted through the classrooms...
...General Court of the Massachusetts Bay appropriated one quarter of its tax levy "towards a schoale or college." Over a year elapsed before any further steps were taken, but late in 1637 the first Overseers purchased a slip of land from Goodman Peyntree on the southern edge of Cowyard Row. (The present Cambridge Common is all that remains of this great cow pasture.) Around this nucleus the Yard slowly expanded until reaching its present size in the first half of the eighteenth century...
This is a lame excuse. Because the University has spread beyond the original acre and a quarter of cowyard procured by Governor Winthrop in 1637 for "a schoale or colledge" is no reason for adopting a name totally alien to our way of life. The ex-swampland which is Eliot House and the far-off wilderness which is Dunster are no more descended from the Romans' Campus Martius than are the peaceful preserves of Hollis and Stoughton. Both sides of Mass. Ave. are equally consecrated to intellectual grazing, luminating, and chewing...
...snobbish and aristocratic name, was once just what that name did mean. For in the days of much Latin and little English, all gootle and healthie colleges did have a central plotted upon which fed the domestic servants of all the local savants, and thus did the name of "cowyard," and later just "yard" come to grace the muddy bit of land enclosed by our older and more renowned dwellings. And rightly then did all good men and true feel that they had a just and honored right to herd their cows nearby...
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