Talk:You have two cows

Original defs

An old version says:

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Neurogeek (talk | contribs) at 21:33, July 3, 2022 (→History: Privately accessed the "In Defense of Dictionaries and Definitions" reference and restored the citation to the 1944 text. The 1944 article is not freely available, and must be accessed through a library collection or subscription..)

Unfortunately user:Neurogeek no longer edits, but there is no reason not to believe then, therefore if anybody changes them in our article, must present a strong evidence. --Altenmann >talk 01:28, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

@Altenmann Thanks for the mention. I'm a drive-by Wikipedia editor. I accessed Henninger's 1936 essay "In Defense of Dictionaries and Definitions" in July of 2022, and kept a copy privately for my own reference. A first quick Wikipedia edit was to modify these phrases in the Wikipedia article to conform to the cited reference.

Taking a step back, I don't think that Henninger's 1936 essay is an appropriate citation for the comedic use of these phrases. Henninger summarizes his essay with the sentences: "Meaning, pronunciation, and spelling, in the order given, are the essential things about words. More time is justified on all, especially the first." He presents this set of phrases as definitions of "isims", within the context of an essay directed toward understanding words. Henninger writes, "The following definitions of isms, used in a political campaign in Chicago some years ago, are obviously unorthodox, but they are unusually specific, anything but abstract, and of telepathic brevity. The objection to them is simply that they have something to "sell", something else to condemn, and that volumes pro and con have been written about these things." For Henninger, these are appropriate ways to communicate the meaning of these "isms", without a formal dictionary definition.

It looks like @Quiddity edited this article in 2010 and accessed some of these sources using resources available here: Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request/Archive 3. Some of the other sources may be more appropriate references to explain how these phrases are used comedically. Additional interesting information is available in the Talk Archive for this page...

Alternately, this Wikipedia article could be modified to include the way in which the "You have two cows..." analogy is used to communicate meaning and describe the political systems in question.

I don't reasonably anticipate spending more time on editing this article.

Finally, nobody owns a Wikipedia page WP:OWN. "No one, no matter what, has the right to act as if they are the owner of a particular article (or any part of it)." Neurogeek (talk) 12:56, 23 April 2025 (UTC)

@Neurogeek: Thank you very much. I don't quite understand the issue about WP:OWN. My point was that the initial list was cited to some source, and therefore their text cannot be modified, because it is a quotation. Since it is appears to be the first known use of "bovinisms", it is important to preserve them for authenticity. Nobody prevents people of adding more of them, if they come from reliable secondary sources which disuss the subject in reasonable depth, not just mention them as a curiosity. (The article does have three such cases.) Otherwise our articles will turn in one huge jokebook, rather than enyclopedia. There are zillions Jewish jokes, thousands of reasons why did the chicken crossed the roads, crores of sardarji jokes... And of course thousands of jokebooks which published them, which are formally "reliable sources". Of course, if the community decides that there is a place for a jokebook in Wikipedia, why not. After all, we have articles like List of people with surname Jones, so the article List of jokes about mother-in-laws, is not much worse. Heck, some people vote to keep the page Draft:List of songs with the word "song" in their title or lyrics. --Altenmann >talk 16:11, 23 April 2025 (UTC)