The word "ram" has now several more general uses. We speak of a person "ramming" things into a drawer or bag when we mean pushing them hastily and untidily into too small a place. Or a man may "ram" his hat down on his head. Again, we may have a lesson or unpleasant fact "rammed" into us by some one who is determined to make the subject clear whether we want to hear about it or not. And all this comes from the simple idea of the ram butting people whom it considers unpleasant.
More commonplace instruments having animals' names are the "clothes'-horse" and "fire-dogs."
We have other words, which we should not guess to be from animals' names, but which really are so. We say that a person who is always changing his mind, and wanting first one thing and then another, is "capricious." Or we speak of a curious or unreasonable desire as a "caprice." These words really come from the Latin name for a goat--_caper_. The mind of the capricious person skips about just like a goat. At least that is what the word _capricious_ literally says about him. The word _caper_, meaning to "jump about playing tricks," comes from the Latin word _capra_, a "she-goat."
The word _coward_ comes from the name of an animal, but _not_ the cow. In a famous French story of the Middle Ages, in which all the characters are animals, the "Roman de Renard," the hare is called _couard_, and it is from this that the word _coward_ ("one who runs away from danger") comes.
All these words from the names of animals take us back, then, to the days when every man was a kind of naturalist. In those early days, when town life hardly existed, everybody knew all about animals and their habits. Their conversation was full of this sort of thing. And so it is that in hundreds of our words which we use to-day, without thinking of the literal meaning at all, we have a picture of the lives of our ancestors preserved.
We have, too, words taken from the names of some animals which never existed at all. The writers of the Middle Ages told many tales or fables of animals and monsters which were purely imaginary, but in which the people of those days firmly believed. We sometimes hear people use the expression a "basilisk glare," which other people would describe as a "look that kills," meaning a look of great severity or displeasure. There is a little American lizard which zoologists call the "basilisk," but this is not the basilisk from which this expression comes. The basilisk which the people of the Middle Ages imagined, but which never existed, was a monstrous reptile hatched by a serpent from a cock's egg. By its breath or even its look it could destroy all who approached it.
