Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia writer and columnist. Yes, Australia – but Donald Trump’s election affected her adversely, too, by ruining her fitness routine for more than a year. I suppose she wrote this piece with her tongue in her cheek but what do I know? It’s a great read, and even a greater one if meant seriously – the unintentionally ridiculous is the best. This bit is odd, though:
I pulled the sled like a human oxen while being filmed and the gym staff cheered. I did it. But the Trump victory soured my successful show of strength.
Isn’t oxen the plural of ox, inherited from Old English, where the weak noun oxa became oxan in the plural? Also compare the German counterpart: der Ochse, plural die Ochsen.
Googling shows that “an oxen” used as a noun (not as a modifier, as in “an oxen breeder”) is a relatively common corruption. Apparently, many English speakers don’t perceive “oxen” as a plural anymore. On the other hand, Scots has een for eyes and sheen, shuin, shoon for shoes; dictionaries also claim that shoon survives in some English dialects, not only in verse.
Oxen-related misquotes from the Book of Daniel are particularly remarkable. In Chapter 4, the king Nebuchadnezzar hears a prophetic voice from above:
And they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen…
Which is exactly what happens:
….and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen…
None of the English versions at biblehub.com has the indefinite article before “oxen,” just as one would expect. Nevertheless, Nebuchadnezzar is forced to feed on grass like “an oxen” in a number of printed volumes indexed by Google, in contradiction to all the authoritative English translations from Wycliffe to the latest, most improved American version. Volumes, that is, with titles such as
The Prayer Ministry of the Church
Jesus and the Culture Wars: Reclaiming the Lord’s Prayer
An End Time Look at God’s Redemption Plan
How to Run Your Business by The Book: A Biblical Blueprint to Bless Your Business
and other fruit of applied Protestant theology. Elizabeth Derry’s Lucifer Is Not Satan stands out as a more ambitious exegetical effort. Whether its argument succeeds or not, the book description delivers:
This budding author has already written 26 books; Lucifer part 1&2 being the first to be published.
This impressed me so much that I couldn’t complete the post for two days. What would life be without such passages and their budding authors?
Returning to the boring stuff, perhaps some speakers are guided by an instinctive comparison of oxen to vixen, unnatural as it seems in substance. Vixen is akin to Füchsin:
Solitary English survival of the Germanic feminine suffix -en, -in (also in Old English gyden “goddess;” mynecen “nun,” from munuc “monk;” wlyfen “she-wolf,” etc.).
Alliteration has also survived: “Business by the Book: A Biblical Blueprint to Bless Your Business,” oh my! Delaney’s alliterative sequence is far more tasteful: “…soured my successful show of strength.”