July 28, 2000

kowtow

Just curious about the origins of a word I've used all my life: cowtow. I recently used it while speaking to a friend and he had never heard it before. Can you help me explain? I use it to mean catering to someone.

Change the first letter and you'll have it--kowtow. The first syllable is usually pronounced exactly like our word cow, which makes your thinking that it was spelled with a "c" quite understandable, and the second syllable rhymes with the first. An alternate spelling of the first syllable is ko-, with the word accordingly pronounced "KOE-tow."

I'm surprised that your friend had never encountered the term; it's been used in English for some 200 years. In spite of that, at least a vague awareness of the word's Asian origins is often not far from people's minds; the images evoked by literal kowtowing are so vivid.

Kowtow is derived from Chinese koutou, with kou meaning 'knock' and tou meaning 'head'. The original sense of the term as used in China involved knocking (or at least touching) one's forehead to the ground while kneeling in front of a religious shrine or a person, in order to express worship and obedience or to show respect, reverence, and utter submission to someone higher than oneself in the social order.

That was the regular kowtow. A commoner, for example, would kowtow to a local government official when asking him to grant a request. Then there was the full kowtow--kind of like the full monty of kowtows. For this, you would prostrate yourself full-length on the floor, with your head toward the object of your respect. During the period from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the kowtowing ritual grew even more involved, whether done by the emperor to the shrine of Confucious or performed by the emperor's own officials--as well as by foreign dignitaries--before the emperor himself. A 1966 historical citation from the OED relates that "Not even the emissaries of the Pope could escape the Great Kow-tow--the ceremony involving the three kneelings and nine prostrations before the throne of the Chinese Emperor."

Such rituals, vitally significant to the Chinese, were anathema to visiting western officials, since they not only signified acknowledgment of China as the center of the world but of the emperor as the divine son of heaven. These Westerners resisted the kowtow, vigorously and noticeably, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, were no longer required to participate in the ritual. By the early twentieth century, the kowtow had fallen out of use in any case.

The metaphorical, extended, or diluted senses of kowtow, 'to act in an obsequious manner; show servile deference' and 'the act of kowtowing' (no damage to the head), have been attested since the mid-1800's. Here is a quote from an 1897 issue of Catholic World that sounds eerily appropriate for today: "...it must needs be only a few to whom the poets appeal. The world looks wise at mention of Dante's name, Browning Clubs kowtow solemnly to their fetich [older spelling, ed.], but after all we flock merrily to the support of the 'new' journalism, and for inspiration study the quotations of the stock markets."

Enid