If I were to say “It’s time for the rowen,” I suspect not many would know what I meant, and yet it’s something all of you have seen here in late New Hampshire summers year after year: the second cutting of hay. I first stumbled across this word in my college library in a book on old farming words. I took the book back to my own personal old farmers, my father and grandfather, and found that Grandpa knew every word, Dad knew some, and I knew only a few.

“But, Grandpa, you never called it that! You always said second cutting.”

“That’s cuz no one up here knew what I was talkin’ about if I said it!” (For the record, “up here” was our family farm near Syracuse, just 35 miles north from where he grew up).

The point is: use it or lose it. Words fade and die unless we trot them out and give them some good exercise now and then. It’s sad when an immigrant family’s children end up not knowing the language of their parents’ homeland because they didn’t speak it at home. It takes so much effort to learn a language in school, but when you’re 2, it’s as easy as breathing. In the same way, it’s sad when older English words are lost. Change is inevitable, of course, but why should such a handy word as “rowen” slip from general use into near oblivion? It’s a mystery.

Before we go any further, a quick aside: the quirks of the English language create confusion in words spelled -ow, so just to be clear, “rowen” rhymes with “plowin’ ” and not with “rowin’ a boat.” That pronunciation goes with “rowan,” the flower, which is also sometimes a first name spelled with E instead of A.

When you consult the dialect studies, it turns out “rowen” has always been limited to New Englanders and their descendants in upstate New York. This is another point in its favor because regional words root us to our native soils. It’s important to keep these endangered words alive to spice up our conversations and keep our language from becoming bland and homogenized.

As my campaign to save the old language was gearing up a while back, you could have knocked me over with a feather one day as I waited in line at the Wilton post office, and heard someone in the next line over say to the postmaster: “The rowen looks good this year.” This individual was a long-bearded, bib-overalled older fella – every inch an old Yankee farmer. The postmaster nodded agreeably, but I wondered if he really knew what he meant.

Despite my discovery that “rowen” lives on in Wilton, many respondents to a New England survey in the 1960s already considered “rowen” old-fashioned. There have also been some variations in New England, including “rowit, rowil, rowidge.” Several other terms were also in use: “aftermath, aftergrass, aftergrowth,” and, over in England, “lattermath, roughings,” and “eddish.” The “-math” part comes from the ancestor of “to mow” with a typical -th ending that was added to create nouns (grow-growth, wide-width).

In the American South and Midlands, “second crop” is common, while here in New Hampshire I’ve noticed some folks talk about the “second cut.” Maybe that’s a regional variation too, but it sounds odd to me. Where I come from, it’s the “second cutting” or actually “second cuttin’. “

In closing, rowen hay is very nutritious. First cutting has lots of stalks, while the rowen hay doesn’t grow as high, so it is leafier. That’s where the nutrients reside, as opposed to the fiber of the first cutting’s stalks. You can sometimes even get a third cutting these days, one of the few benefits, perhaps, of climate change.