Review of Horse
As for horse, it is also a widely misunderstood concept. We know for sure it is not a cow. In fact, judging from the ancient Greek word Centaur, meaning “killer of bulls”, men on horseback have once slain bulls for whatever purpose they may have found for such sport. This is assuming, of course, centaurs did not exist.
Horses have played an essential part in many human conquests, from Genghis Khan to the subduing of America. If it had not been for horses, men would, for centuries, have been incapable of killing each other in as large quantities as they have. The existence of horse and the discovery it could be tamed has been very practical to human beings, who cannot run very fast or carry a lot of goods.
Today, inspired by horse, humans have invented more efficient means of transporting their bodies and their armory. For instance, the train was called “iron horse” by Native Americans. That is a very astute observation. I am, of course, referring to the historical sense, when I say “recently.” It is not like I heard someone say it yesterday or even in the last week.
A horse is very much like a giant rodent, only with hooves. It has meek eyes, but its face is not meant to be very communicative. Horse roamed the plains for a very long time, until humans made it a possession. It still eats grass. Horses in the wild have the appearance of fierceness, but they are really very timid animals.
Once tamed, horse possesses a strange and on occasion self-destructive loyalty, making humans capable of riding horses into war and have both human and horse killed by a lance or an arrow or a gunshot or a cannon ball.
A Greek warrior named Hector had the knickname "tamer of horses", and from this person we have the expression hectoring, as in "societal hectoring", which means to bully people and push them to perform.
The aforementioned loyalty is what made horse a symbol of persistence and devotion.
In Animal Farm, a story written by an Englishman named George Orwell, a horse consistently deals with all the corruption and multitudes of errors of the surrounding society by saying:
“I will work harder.”
Human beings also have a common expression called “work horse”, a term you can use for a hardworking member of another species than horse, most often humans.
Usually the term would indicate you are not too bright or creatively gifted; it is kind of an insult to horse, which has other amiable qualities.
More flattering, some human beings associate horse with royalty or nobility. This is because horses at one point in time were very expensive and mostly belonged to royalty or nobility.
Royalty is when a few human beings are so much more important than the rest they can kill other human beings to have more possessions, or use other human beings to kill those who threaten to take their possession or, perhaps, claim they are not royalty at all. So, there used to be a lot of discussions about who were royalty with regard to what area.
Today royalty is mostly for show, and the same goes for horse. You can watch horse in the circus or in the race track or in the stable. The stable is where they live. Often horses are also actors. If you look very carefully in Hollywood movies, particularly Westerns, you will notice a large animal with an elongated face and very skinny, but also extremely strong legs. That is horse.
Horse has been pivotal to the development of human civilization as we know it. But because human beings often overlook that and tend to neglect even very helpful animals, laws have been passed against mistreating horses for movie productions. If you look even more carefully, there is often a text added to movies with horses in them, which state something along the lines of:
“No horses were killed or injured during this movie production.”
This is a way of saying that human society has evolved, and human beings today are proud about the way they have begun to protect horses from being squashed for the sake of our profit or entertainment.
Also, a lot of little girls like horses and want a horse very much. They like it as a pastime, because it is neat, and it seems nice, and it is something large and powerful they can control. Some have to settle for a pony, which is a smaller horse, but still rather large for a little girl.
I find horse to be too nice, too eager to please, too easy to push around. How it qualified to become the target of an idiom like "horse around" beats me.