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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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There is no animal called "cow".
Cow is a term for females of multiple species.
The animal that gives us milk is called cattle. Female cattle are cows. Male cattle are bulls.
I always thought cattle was a synonym for livestock, but it is a species of animal.
Words mean how people use them. There is absolutely an animal called a cow, regardless of sex, and it's a synonym for cattle.
You are also correct that cow means female is many species.
Ok
$10 says you are the person that makes everyone bummed when you show up .
Edit: you sure have a lot of accounts to downvote me with lil fella. I bet you'll have a great time talking about it tomorrow ~~alone~~ I mean with your "friends".
Wow. You really over estimated how much I care. Here, I'll upvote you so you can feel better about yourself.
Also why would you even bother creating accounts to downvote someone
I guess that's important to some people.
Well thank you Mr comment watcher person. I sure do feel fuzzy inside now.
Glad I could help! Hope today is great as well!
Hey everyone, look at this guy! He thinks he deserves upvotes for being clever and not downvotes for an off topic, personal attack that derails the conversation.
Welcome to lemmy, where proper rediquette is actually followed sometimes.
Leonard, I give zero fucks about fake Internet points, I wasn't trying to be clever, and I wasn't trying to derail a conversation that wasn't even happening.. but it seems I sure was stating a fact.
Similarly, and also often misunderstood...
Peacock only refers to the males. A female is called a peahen.
Collectively they are an ungodly ruckus of peafowl.
Honestly not sure which is worse. Peafowl or guinea fowl
I've lived near both, and only one made me think that children were being murdered nearby.
Peafowl sound like nightmares.
First time I heard peafowl at night, I honestly thought a woman was being murdered in the distance or something. I was a kid and had to ask my parents what was going on. I almost didn't believe them because I didn't even know there were peafowl down the road at all. But that memory always stuck with me lol
That is such a logical thing, when you think about it.
My parents have several peacreatures...... a refer to them as shut the fuck up.... they are the donkeys of birds and should be exterminated.
"Look at me, I'm so pretty!" "AHHHHH-RAAAAAAAAAH! AH-RAH! AHHHHH RAAAAAAAAAAA!"
I live a 1/2 mile or so away and down a different road but they still sound like they are in my yard screaming..... the first one they got immediately flew away, so then they had to make a giant outdoor cage with a roof to keep the next ones in..... I'm not a genius but I believe if you have to build a outdoor prison compound to keep in your stupid screaming birds you should probably find a different hobby.
Oh yeah! That's a good one too!
You say peacock and nobody bats an eye... but you say poopcock and everyone LOSES THEIR MINDS
- The Joker
Wait. The singular of cattle is cattle? I think that's the part that confuses me. Or is there no singular and you must use cow/bull? Either way I've never really thought about it and now I can't not
"Cattle" is a mass noun. You have a lot of cattle.
If you want to state a number of them, you have seventy-two head of cattle. "Head" is a counter; compare "sheets of paper", "bales of hay", or "hands of poker".
You wouldn't say you have fifty hay, or that you played five pokers. And "papers" (count noun) are written works, whereas "paper" (mass noun) or "sheets of paper" (mass noun with counter) is what the works are written on.
If you're in the cattle business, you absolutely do care about their age, sex, and reproductive status. So you might have one calf and six cows; or three steers; or two heifers, a yearling calf, and a bull.
If you really need to refer to one bovine without talking about its age, sex, or reproductive status ... you have one head of cattle, or you have a cattlebeast.
Yep, that's a thing.
Actually, your already familiar with this: Moose.
One Moose. Two Moose. Male is a bull. Female is a cow. 🤯
No, the person you're replying to is just wrong. The common name for that animal is cow, and in common usage it can refer to both sexes. Cattle is the plural.
Words don't work this way. They more often than not have multiple, somewhat overlapping, meanings. For example, Wiktionary lists five meanings for the word, when it comes to quadrupeds:
You're likely referring to meaning #4 or #5, but keep in mind that #1 is the most common and #2 is likely the original one (due to the cognates).
See in number 2, where it says loosely or informal?
That means, "people have said this wrong for so long, that some may become argumentative if you try to tell them it's wrong."
Kind of like how literally, literally means literally, but it was funny to say literally when you meant figuratively, so literally literally is literally literally figuratively literally. Literally.
"Loosely or informal" solely means that it's associated with an informal register, specially in contrast with #1. Any claim past is assumption.
"Wrong" is relative. Which is the standard/reference that you're using for contrast? Your own usage?
And odds are that #2 is the original meaning. It isn't like "people suddenly started to refer to Bos taurus regardless of sex", it's more like "people have been using it with this meaning for thousands of years". #1 (the more common meaning) is likely the result of semantic narrowing, and #5 (the one that you're defending as "correct") is probably fairly recent. None of those meanings should be seen as "incorrect", but picking on a meaning that backtracks all the way into Proto-Indo-European is extremely obtuse. (And no, the situation is nothing like the one for "literally".)
Wut.
I'm not sure if your mind is blown because you also didn't know that, or you don't understand what I'm saying.
I could clarify if you'd like, but you'll have to let me know what you mean by Wut.
What you've said is technically correct (the best kind of correct). But the word cattle is also used to refer to other similar animals such as Yak, Bison, Buffalo.
Merriam-Webster defines cattle as
Cambridge defines it as:
And Oxford as:
Wikipedia is more specific and defines it as:
Not disputing your fact at all, just clarifying that words often have multiple meanings and meanings also change over time according to popular usage, so saying cattle means livestock isn't necessarily wrong, it's just not as precise as the technical definition. And the more people that use it that way the more correct it becomes. As I dove deeper into the topic, I'm seeing evidence that suggests that Cattle is also an American term that means Livestock, but is marked as archaic. Which honestly makes sense as the word's etymology is the following according to Merriam-Webster:
Anyway, good fact nonetheless.
Yeah. I often heard cattle used in that way, so that's why I thought it. So, no it's not wrong, but it was pretty wild to learn that it wasn't completely correct.
What's wild to me is that humans decided to name a whole-ass species "Property".
I think it's the other way around.
Like you might call a bunch of mindless followers "sheep". We didn't name the animal after those people, we started using the word that way because it reminded us of the animal.
The etymology suggests that originally we just called livestock cattle (i.e. these are My animals, my property), and the name was so ubiquitous that when it came time to give the specific species a name, it stuck.
I just assumed otherwise, because that's pretty funny if it's true.
Definitely meant as in I had no idea either and you helped me learn something today ☺️