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The best thing for the inside of a man is the outside of a horse. Old Alberta ranch hands swear by this cowboy truism. A variant was one of the catchphrases of American cowboy star and humorist Will Rogers: “The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a person.” The same grizzled riders tell you they want to die in the saddle or die falling off their horse. A smidgeon of clinical evidence from doctors supports the contention that horse-riding is good exercise, as long as you don’t carry an osteoporotic spinal column, as long as you don’t have rider’s butt. Rider’s Butt This Alberta ranch phrase, also called rider’s bum, is coccygeal tendonitis. Your coccyx (common pronunciation: COCK-sicks) is your tailbone, your ass bone, the last little triangular wedge of a vertebra at the end of your spinal column, a tiny bone formed from four or five even smaller rudimentary vertebrae.
The tailbone can get bumped and bruised riding a horse or sitting for too long during a motorboat ride, hence one of its other everyday names: motorboat bum. There are several jawbuster jargon terms from medical vocabulary to describe this pain in the region of the tailbone: coccygodynia, coccyalgia, coccydynia, When painful inflammation occurs after a hard day’s ‘writhing,’ as one older cowboy referred to all day in the saddle, the tendons that attach to, help support and keep in place the tailbone swell. Swollen, inflamed tendons are at risk of rupturing, so galloping over hard prairie with rider’s butt is exceedingly stupid. Ruptured tendons hurt much more than lightly pulled tendons. Healing lymph, a liquid that causes some of the swelling, may also induce pain when the swollen tissue around the tailbone presses on nearby spinal nerves. Rest is the best therapy. Sufficient perhaps will be a few lazy days in the bunkhouse rereading some good, energetic Alberta fiction like Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man.
Ornithological Extra Word Fact about your Coccyx In languages all over the world, including English and Greek, humans name some animals by their characteristic sounds. In English coot is such a bird name, imitating that bird’s cry as heard by an early speaker of the language. In Old English cu was the echoic word for cow. It’s reasonably certain that cu (coo) was an early Teutonic version of moo! To the ancient Greeks the sound made by the cuckoo bird was kokkuks! Not too far from the English word cuckoo. The Greek word naming that bird for its characteristic call found its way into Latin as coccyx and the Latin word was adopted into English medical terminology. Early Roman anatomists thought the little tailbone at the end of the human spine looked like a cuckoo’s bill, a teeny triangle. That’s how the tailbone received its medical name, coccyx.
Livestock Auction Sayings from Alberta 1. He’s walkin’ around like a stud horse on his way to the mare’s stall. • This was heard to describe a proud horse owner leading his animal around the sales ring at a horse auction. 2. She’s longer than a bad dream! • This is a cattle auction saying describing the length of a heifer. A variant is ‘longer than a wet week.’ Another is ‘longer than a well rope.’ 3. That bull’s flashier than a rat with a gold tooth. 4. Buy this bull and you’ll toss your old one out like a bride’s nightie.
Well, pardners, that’s all the pinto had under the saddle today.
© 2007 William Gordon Casselman * The title graphic is "Don Quijote" by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), Mexican master engraver and illustrator extraordinaire.
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and coccyodynia. –Algia and –dynia are suffixes in medical vocabulary that both signify ‘pain,’ from Greek words algia ‘a feeling of pain’ and odyne ‘pain.’ A drug or thought or object that relieves pain is an anodyne, from Greek a ‘not’ + Greek n (often called “euphonic nu” because a letter n is inserted in the word to make it easier and quicker to pronounce) + odyne Greek ‘pain.’ 
