A Sunnit to the Big Ox
(Composed while standing within two feet
of him, and a’tuchin of him now and then.)
All hale! thou mighty annimil – all hale!
You are 4 thousand pounds, and am purty wel
Perporshund, thou tremendjus boveen nuggit!
I wonder how big yu was when yu
Was little, and if yure mother would no yu now
That yu’ve grone so long, and thick, and fat;
Or if yure father would rekognise his ofspring
And his kaff, thou elephanteen quadrupid!
I wonder if it hurts yu much to be so big,
And if yu grode it in a month or so.
I spose when yu was young tha didn’t gin
Yu skim milk but all the creme yu could stuff
Into yore little stummick, jest to see
How big you’d gro; and afterward tha no doubt
Fed yu on oats and hay and sich like,
With perhaps an occasional punkin or squosh!
In all probability yu don’t know yu’re anny
Bigger than a small kaff; for if yu did
Yude break down fences and switch yure tail,
And rush around and hook and beller,
And run over fowkes, thou orful beast.
O, what a lot of mince pies yude maik,
And sassengers, and your tail,
Whitch can’t weigh fur from forty pounds,
Wud maik nigh unto a barrel of ox-tail soup,
And cudn’t a heep of staiks be cut off you,
Whitch, with salt and pepper and termater
Ketchup, wouldn’t be bad to taik.
Thou grate and glorious inseckt!
But I must close, O most prodijus reptile!
And for mi admiration of yu, when yu di,
I’le rite a node unto yure peddy and remanes,
Pernouncin yu the largest of yure race;
And as I don’r expec to have half a dollar
Again to spair for to pay to look at yu, and as
I ain’t a dead head, I will sa, farewell.
Anon. (19th century).
A small glossary for the more likely problem words:
sunnit: ‘sonnet’, though obviously here not pertaining to the prescribed poetic form of 14 lines. It refers to another more general and less frequent usage meaning simply a ‘little song’
tha didn’t gin: ‘they didn’t give’
a node: ‘an ode’
peddy: At first I thought it could mean a ‘paddock’, an enclosure for horses, cattle, and other large animals, a ‘pad’ being a path on which to roam. In ‘paddock’, the word generally used, the ‘-ock’ serves as a diminutive suffix, as in, e.g., (and aptly here) ‘bullock’. Or … ‘pedigree’? That’s a possibility. ‘Body’, too, would make sense; on the whole, I’d go for that. Any suggestions?
A neat poem, I thought. Witty. The language used is funny. Now I wish I’d used ‘yu’ / ‘yu’d’ etc., in Revenge of the Black Dog, just recently posted, and I’m thinking of going back and doing just that.
I found this ‘Big Ox’ poem in an old collection, undated but from the cover decoration typical of the 1920s, and a time when it was ‘the thing’ to fiddle about with spelling in comic verse. It’s an English publication, and I thought that the ‘countrified’ style must indicate the deepest English farming south, Bedfordshire’s green spreads or thereabouts. I expected it to be that. But on a second reading, there were plain signs that it was American (the mentions of pumpkin and squash – not unknown in England, admittedly, but decidedly more popular in America – tomato ketchup, half a dollar, and a term such as ‘dead head’). So then I paid closer attention and took proper notice of the ‘purty’, the ‘kaff’, the ’spose’, the ‘beller’ and the ‘fur’. The ‘purty’ with its re to ur metathesis stood out, and the ‘kaff’ with its short vowel clinched it as a poem from across the Atlantic. As to the words first mentioned, I took a look at what I have on etymologies / archaic language / historical slang, etc. (always leaving The Great God Google as a very last resort, otherwise why did I buy these tomes years ago? ‘What’s the point of owning a mace if you don’t use it?’), discovering that tomato ketchup was concocted first in America as early as 1812, and that deadhead (a term new to me), having the meaning of a person who hasn’t paid for an entrance ticket and therefore eminently suitable as it appears in the closing line, originated in the USA in 1849, becoming anglicized c.1864. In the course of time words naturally travel in more than one direction. I’d venture to place this lovable contribution to humorous verse around the third quarter of the 19th c.
© 2024 Dafydd Hughes Lewis. All rights reserved. 
Funny one, this!
I always thought Ketchup originated in China, but found different stories of origin on the Great God Google and AI (the real god):
Version 1
“The origins of tomato ketchup can be traced back to a fermented fish sauce from China, and the word “ketchup” comes from the Hokkien Chinese word kê-tsiap. The sauce was likely brought to China from Vietnam by traders. British sailors encountered the sauce in Southeast Asia and brought it back to England, where they tried to replicate it.”
Version 2
“Ketchup is a condiment made from tomatoes and is closely associated with American cuisine. Ketchup was invented in 1812 by the American manufacturer, grocer, and chemist James Mease of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”
Interestingly, the China origin version seems more prevalent though. Another fun fact I learned during my ketchup research is that Canadians eat the most of it: “The US probably eats the most amount of ketchup overall, but when it comes to per person, Canada is in the lead.”
😆🇨🇦🍅
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Thanks for your interesting reply, Cicymru. I hadn’t looked into the origins of ‘ketchup’ as separate from ‘tomato ketchup’ as used in The Big Ox poem, where I referred in the notes to its ‘invention’ by that fellow from Philadelphia, which see you also mention. I didn’t know that the word comes from the Chinese via South-east Asia, and of that there’s good evidence – so thanks! Since, I’ve spent some time looking up both ‘ketchup’ and ‘tomato’.
It seems that the ketchup as used in China was a mix of pickled fish, and that the word, along with variations of the recipe was, as you say, transported abroad by trading vessels, being known and used in England.
The word ‘tomato’ my book-source tells me, is American-Spanish for Spanish ‘tomate’ which linguistically eases an original Aztec ‘tomatl’. The tomato plant (so Wiki tells me) originated from and was domesticated before 500BCE in western South America, widely cultivated there and used by the Aztecs as/in sauces. The Spanish, in the 16th century, then introduced it not only to the Old World but to their possessions in the Philippines, from where it spread to South-east Asia and then the whole of Asia. It was introduced to China, probably via the Philippines or Macau, during the same century. In China it was given the name ‘fãnqié’ (‘foreign eggplant’) as the Chinese named many foodstuffs introduced from abroad.
So the question seems to be ‘Did the original Chinese word ‘ket-siap’ (that might not be the correct rendering – you have it above in your comment, but I can’t reach it from this box
) mean ‘tomato ketchup’ or just ‘ketchup?’ I suspect the latter, as ketchup as a sauce was during the age of trade by sail known and used in England in its ‘non-tomato’ form – as far as I can determine – until the tomato variety was introduced following its ‘discovery’ by the fellow from Philadelphia, who was, it appears, unaware that the Aztecs had developed a taste for it over 2,500 years previously. 🙂 Very interesting, this whole thing!
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Thanks for the info! Certainly very interesting, and rather complex 😊
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Thanks, Cicymyu: You started me off on the search with the info, totally unknown to me, that ‘ketchup’ derived from a Chinese word, and there’s no doubt of that, and that it was carried abroad in the days of sail to become know by millions.. As for tomatoes, there’s no reason why their cultivation shouldn’t have reached China from South-east Asia by, say, at least the early 17th century. In the Chinese classic “Dream of Red Mansions’, written in the mid-18th century, there are a couple of references of the characters picking and eating tomatoes directly from the plant.
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