Plurals

“cattle” vs. “cows”

Nouns, Plurals, Versus

I wrote yesterday about the nouns “swine” and “pig”.

Thinking about other animals, this has made me ask even more questions: 1. What exactly does “cattle” mean? 2. How is “cattle” related to “cow”? 3. Is it preferable to refer to bovines as “cattle” or “cows”?

Dictionary.com says that the plural noun “cattle” primarily means bovine animals, esp. domesticated members of the genus Bos.

And Dictionary.com says that the first three meanings of the noun “cow” are (a) the mature female of a bovine animal, esp. of the genus Bos, (b) the female of various other large animals, as the elephant or whale, and (c) Informal. a domestic bovine of either sex and any age.

So it is preferable to use “cattle” to refer to bovines in general and to use “cows” to refer specifically to mature female bovines or to refer to the females (usually mature) of other large animals (usually mammals).

“I have two train of thoughts on that.”

Common English Blunders, Plurals

I heard this last week on a conference call.

Problem:
The speaker pluralized the wrong word.

Explanation:
Someone made a comment during a conference call.

The call’s facilitator responded to the comment by saying, “I have two train of thoughts on that.”

Given that “two” modifies “train” and not “thought”, the word “train” — not the word “thought” — should have been pluralized.

This type of mistake is a common English blunder in spoken American English because avoiding it requires one to think quickly beyond the common pattern of putting the pluralizing S or E-S at the very end of a concept, which in this case is “train of thought”.

Another example of this type of mistake is pluralizing “attorney general” by saying the incorrect phrase “attorney generals” instead of the correct phrase “attorneys general”.

Solution:
“I have two trains of thought on that.”

“Alumni” Revisited

Common English Blunders, Nouns, Plurals

I got an interesting email message last Monday from one of your fellow readers of this blog.

I will refer to her simply as “Paula” because I don’t have permission to use her surname.

Paula had read “Alumnus” vs. “Alumna” vs. “Alumni” vs. “Alumnae”.

She also had seen a link named “Miss ND Alumni” at the top of the Miss North Dakota website.

Paula told me, “I had just dashed off a note to the webmaster of the Miss North Dakota pageant where the menu item is Miss ND Alumni, and I listed the masculine and feminine singular and plural forms of Alumnus.”.

She thanked me for “defending correct English usage”.

Thank you, Paula, for defending correct English usage, too!

And, in case my statement in the earlier post was unclear, let me stress here that it is correct to use the masculine plural form when referring to a group of males and females.

In contrast, because the Miss North Dakota contest is only for women, “Miss ND Alumnae” — not “Miss ND Alumni” — is the correct name for the link on the Miss North Dakota website.