A Blog by Cowboy Bob
As a Cowboy, one of my skills is looking at cows and horses and making sure they are healthy and if they are getting enough to eat or if they are too thin. My widow friend in Idaho got me to thinking about the word svelte, a Norse word that drifted over into French and Italian meaning slender and elegant. She was bemoaning the fact that being svelte seemed to go against her genes, her self-described condition as being a rotund fireplug despite being on every diet known to womankind.
“What the heck,” I wondered, as I read her words, I don’t see that, but again, compared to the starved weather woman on my B&W TV, I can see her point, being compared to some movie stereotype image of the California swimsuit beauty rather than a healthy lady of the intermountain area. We have winters out here, and you need to carry a little bit of reserve for those cold days and nights. We have a saying in the spring about how good you appear, “Looks like you wintered pretty good,” we proclaim with genuine appreciation, and it is a common greeting as we dig out of the snow.
As a cowboy, we use a numbering system on our animals known as BCS (Body Condition Score) that has a numbering system from skinny to fat. One means skinny, six to seven being the equivalent of Sophia Loren and nine being extremely fat. This system gets cowboys around the adjectives svelte, curvy, or chubby in describing a horse or cow. Part of our observation is the ribcage, on a six or seven, the fat covers all the ribs, except the last ribs, number twelve or so, having little fat, and on a cow or horse those ribs poke out. As cowboys, habits die hard, so, while dancing at the American Legion, when your cowboy’s hands tickle along your lower ribs, he is genuinely checking out your overall health and not necessarily taking liberties, although I must admit that is a lot of fun and any excuse to hold your darling closer is good.
Now I certainly like my woman elegant, but slender is another word for thin or skinny and so I gotta say, skinny to this old cowboy causes me to wonder if that poor girl is getting enough to eat, or if she is just a hard keeper, or in modern words, high maintenance. In any case, I happen to like the Yiddish word “zaftig.” I know, what does a cowboy know about Yiddish, well, so happens that my college roommate was Jewish, and although he didn’t know much about women, he always described a real looker as being zaftig. Zaftig means “juicy,” it describes a full bodied, voluptuous and rounded women. I always liked that word, although whispering, “You sure are zaftig” into her ear, counting her ribs while dancing and thinking about fat cover sure could earn you a cold shoulder.
My recent trip to Italy and seeing all the amazing sculptures of very curvy women, reminded me that those depictions covered a time span of thousands of years and humankind has always thought the curvy woman was the ideal for most of our history, or as my roommate would say, very zaftig, and I whole heartedly agree.
I tried out this word on my Idaho lady and she squinted at me said, “What the heck are you talking about now, this doesn’t have anything to do with the Kamasutra stuff you were selling last night, does it?” Well, sometimes you can’t win for trying, I think I just got svelted.
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