Ramble #2 (of Many): Bucking Peeves

By which I mean the word peeves me. Welcome to Wanderling's Ramble Time, where I go off on tangents about Pony Things that have caused me intense thought. Last time it was about Zephyr Breeze and his surprisingly accurate portrayal of anxiety.

(Side note: I wonder why there's no way to store unfinished blog posts? Do people write them all into Google Docs or something? I know I have a tendency to accidentally close tabs if I forget what I'm supposed to be doing in them. Perhaps there is such an option and I'm just blind.)

Anyway, todays talk of the day is:

Pony Swearing and Why 'Buck' Needs to be Replaced in the Collective Pony-fiction Syntax, Please for the Love of Celestia I Beg of Thee

Question: Do ponies swear?
Short answer: Yes.
Long answer: Yes, but not like we do!

Swears as said by the show:

Ponyfeathers.
Horseapples.
[Aw,] hay.
Landsakes.
Peeved.

And probably a couple more, but I don't have the dedication to sift through five and a half seasons-worth of episode transcripts looking for them, heh.
So what do they all have in common? Well, they're mostly pony themed, obviously. Ponyfeathers, horseapples and landsakes are all 'nonsense' words, whilst hay is a horse pun for 'hell' and peeved is, well, the word peeved played as a swear for laughs.

Let's go through our 'nonsense' words shall we? I believe Applejack is the source for all of these (Applehorse has a foul mouth!) so that might provide some context.

'Ponyfeathers' first is easily broken down into 'pony' and 'feathers'. The meaning of 'pony' is quite clear, but the 'feathers could be one of two things. It either refers to the feathers of pegasus wings, or to the long lower-leg hair found on some ponies. If you go by the pegasus option, it could be considered an old derogatory term for pegasus feathers that's been filtered down since Hearthswarming. Not sure exactly how this would be an insult, perhaps it's less literal and more of a metaphorical reference to some irritating pegasus behaviours?
On the other hand, leg feathering works much more smoothly. The legs of a pony are probably the most-likely parts to get dirtied after a long day of hard work, or become sodden if one has to pass through water. There could, therefore, be an association between leg-feathers and unpleasantness which lead to the phrase. Or it may be an expression made when one has to get their hooves dirty.

Something along the lines of 'ponyfeathers!' = 'things have gone wrong and now I might need to do something to fix it'.

Horseapples is another simple to decipher word. To be honest, they all are but I'm in language-analysis essay mode and everything must be explained. Horse and apples. Now, it's quite clear on the show - horses are not just large ponies. Look at Troubleshoes - he's big but he's not considered a horse, as far as I'm aware. The only individual horses actually pointed out specifically as being horses were the ones Twilight transformed from mice back in Season 1.
So what are horses to ponies? Just based on speculation, it could be that they are bigger, fairly strong equines, who are more in the vein of cows and sheep than ponies. So the use of horse in a swear could imply stupidity or a brawn-over-brain attitude as a negative trait. When related to apples though, it could mean that 'horseapples' are - metaphorically - apples that are all show and no flavour (*cough*Red Delicious*cough*). 'That's a load of horseapples.' = 'Yeah, right.'
Used as an expression of doubt in the face of something unbelievable, or frustration where something isn't found to a pony's liking.

That, or 'horseapples' is a creative thing to call what our real life horses often leave behind them on the road!

Landsakes strikes me as a very earth pony expression. Landsakes - Land sakes - Land's sake/for the sake of the Land. Fairly self-explanatory in that respect. Strikes me as a fairly mild expletive, and Applejack seems to use it more when she's surprised or aggravated. Or surprised while aggravated.

So that brings me onto popular fan swears. These are usually natural extensions of what we currently see. Horsefeathers and such.

Now we come to the fan-favourite fake pony swear, bucking. Often used as a stand-in for our real-world f-bomb, mostly just because it's a work that's said on the show a lot (thanks again, AJ) and it just happens to rhyme. I understand this, but I cannot make peace with it, because the fandom has neglected what could have been an even better pony swear. Also, despite the show having canonical swears, it is not treated as a swear by canon. It's even the name of an annual 'event' for the Apple family - Applebucking season - and presumably for all of the other fruit-tree growing farmers out there.

Bucking, of course is this:

As it is a behaviour that likely evolved as a means to throw off attackers (predators, other horses, weird hairless monkeys who just want to sit there), and a means of expressing joy at being full of energy in a wide space, and in ponies is a major method of harvesting food, it just doesn't seem logical that the word would evolve into one of the more vulgar swears in common use. How?? Why??

In just jumping straight into the first word that happened to rhyme, the fandom missed a golden opportunity. Why on earth would you use buck, when you can use muck. Not only can it be a perfect horse pun for thematic sense (muck out!), it also rhymes so we know which word it's analogous to, and it's a term for manure so clearly it can evolve into a swear naturally without any fancy mental gymnastics and leaps of logic.

Every time I see the word buck used as a swear, a tear forms in my eye. Okay, I'm being dramatic, but I have a lot of feelings about words and this is a site all about words.

Any of you got anything to add to this muckin' trainwreck?