Or “Whoopee ti yi”, if you prefer.
(I fully expect half the responses to be about Die Hard. Go ahead.)
First: I assume they’re addressing the cows? To what end?
But my real question is: why are they addressing cows in some alien language? And what is the etymology of “yippee ki yay”?
And you’d be right, MuthaFuck.
My guess is that humans have an inherent compulsion to shout random shit while riding a horse. It’s the same impulse that makes us raise our hands and shout “WOOOO!” on a roller coaster.
The yip part of yippee is old. It originated in the 15th century and meant “to cheep, as a young bird,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The more well-known meaning, to emit a high-pitched bark, came about around 1907, as per the OED, and gained the figurative meaning “to shout; to complain.”
…
Yippee came about after yip . The earliest record of this exclamation of delight is from 1920 in Sinclair Lewis’s novel, Main Street: “She galloped down a block and as she jumped from a curb across a welter of slush, she gave a student ‘Yippee !’” …
Now how about the whole phrase, yippee-ki-yay ? It seems to be a play on “yippie yi yo kayah,” a refrain from a 1930s Bing Crosby song, “I’m An Old Cowhand.”
Do cowboys really say this? We’re guessing probably not, unless of course they’re single-handedly (and shoelessly) defeating a gang of bank robbers on Christmas Eve.
Beat me by a whole minute.
Also in “Git Along Little Dogies”, so we can’t link it to a particular song.
The earliest commercial recording of the song was by Harry “Mac” McClintock in 1929 (released on Victor V-40016 as “Get Along, Little Doggies”).
Just a year before Cosby’s. Probably not a coincidence.
I imagine cowboys of old needed a separate language for…
Cows
Horses
Other Cowboys
And on occasion dogs
To avoid confusion, they had to make up all sorts of nonsense words.
Oh, I cain’t git along little dogie.
I cain’t even git one that’s small.
I cain’t git along little dogie.
I cain’t git a dogie at all…
Nonsense words??? As you surmise, they were different languages! My grandfather used “Sooie!” when calling pigs, which comes from the Latin word for pig, and he used “Sook!” when calling cows, which is a Scottish pronunciation of “suck”. Chickens aren’t very multilingual, so he just shouted “chick, chick, chick” for them.
He no longer had horses when I was a kid, but it wouldn’t surprise me it he had shouted “Yippee ki yay!” back then, too.
Haywire Mac is also credited with writing “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum,” a parody of “Revive Us Again.” Mac was also a Wobbly.
And before anyone asks, a dogie is a motherless calf.
Huh, I’ve known of “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” for my whole life, but this is the first I’ve ever heard it was a parody of another song.
My mother used to play those records when I was young. That’s the first time I heard this phrase.
We also used “Sooie” when calling our pigs, but we had no idea that it came from Latin. We used “Bossie” when calling in our milk cow for her morning or evening milking. Don’t think that was Latin, but who knows?
Domestic cattle belong to the genus Bos.
So there you go. We poor dirt farmers were so much smarter than we knew.
The chorus of the original runs
“Hallelujah! Thine the glory!
Hallelujah! Amen!
Hallelujah! Thine the glory!
Revive us again.”
Mac’s version:
Hallelujah, I’m a bum!
Hallelujah, bum again!
Hallelujah, give us a handout
To revive us again!
There is some debate whether Mac wrote it, but I believe he eventually got the copright. As they say, “there was a lot of unprotected music around in those days.”
You can get a footlong dogie in most supermarkets.
Cocktail franks too.
Where are you looking, Home Depot?