Motivated Grammar asks a question which I'd have thought I could answer in a second but I find that I can't.

If you are driving past a field and see a female of the animals mentioned in the title of this post you can exclaim "Look, a cow!". Contrariwise, if you see a male you can cry, "Look, a bull!"

What word fills the gap if you know what kind of animal it is but not the sex?

"Look, a -----------!"

Is there a word?

"Look, a bovine!"?

Cattle is of course a plural noun, so you could say "Look, some cattle!", but not "look, a cattle!".

LATER: I just reached Motivated Grammar in my reader, and see that although he mentions cattle often, and dismisses it as being a plural noun, and uses bovine as an adjective several times, nowhere does he use the noun form of the latter.

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I use cow as both the generic term for cattle and for the female of the species. The archaic plural for cow is kine. Cattle is not really a plural but seems more a collective noun.

Bos. OK, so it's the root form of "bovine," but appropriate. Around here one might hear, "beef" as a generic bovine critter, but then that's related too.

Off the subject slightly, but I used to laugh at the old Merrill-Lynch commercials which depicted a supposedly male bos, but missing the necessary accessories to make it a bull, but the announcer proclaimed, "Merrill-Lynch is bullish on America." Given what happened in the last few years, that error has seemed prescient.

Well, of course if we worry about technicalities with "cows," then we have more to worry about than using "bovine." There are many different types of the bovine animal, from steers to heifers. Can you tell if it's a heifer or not?

It always amuses me how sometimes people can get so worried about what word to use...and yet other times take an anything goes attitude.

In this case, in my opinion a "field of cows" is fine. And as an ex-farm girl, you can quote me on that.

Can you tell if it's a heifer or not?

Well, I can tell the sex of the young cow, but not whether it's been weaned or has calved yet. At least not without more than a cursory glance.

Doesn't "cow" mean "female" of whatever species? Cow elephant, cow whale, cow elk, etc. Yeah, yeah, z, I know words drift and change usage, but you're dealing with a peevish prescriptivist pedant here. What's its etymology? Nordic, I'm guessing. With a cedilla on the "c" it would be "sow." Just a coinkidink?

Doesn't "cow" mean "female" of whatever species?

As I said above, I, and many other English speakers, use cow for both the older female bovine and as a generic term for bovines of any sex and age. The word ox used to be the generic term for bovine animals of either sex, but it has come to be specialized as a castrated male bovine. Language changes.

you're dealing with a peevish prescriptivist pedant here.

You may not like it, and that is your privilege, but we don't have to like your prescription either or pay it any heed.

What's its etymology? Nordic, I'm guessing.

The root is common in most IE languages and is traced back to a reconstructed PIE root: *gwōus 'cow': cf. Sanskrit gaus, Latin bōs, bovis, Greek βοῦς (bous).

Speaking of cattle, the word originally meant any sort of capital, money or animals: cf. Latin pecus 'cattle; herd; sheep', pecunia 'money' cognate with English fee, English chattels (one of the many words of same etymology beginning in either c- and ch-). English cattle comes ultimately from Latin capitalis, so, head of cattle is pleonastic if you don't subscribe to the invalidity of the etymological fallacy.

quote:

Well, I can tell the sex of the young cow, but not whether it's been weaned or has calved yet. At least not without more than a cursory glance.

Yes, the sex of a young cow wouldn't be hard to figure out. But the original question was a field of cows. One would have to be able to see, from a distance, each individual genital. Not that easy!

I did, however, look "cow" up in the OED, hoping for some "go ahead" in using it when one sees a field of cattle. I could only find it used for a female bovine including ox, buffalo, bison, and the domestic species Bos Taurus. It's also used for a female elephant, rhinoceros, whale, and seal. Therefore, perhaps I should take back my advice above and make it just "cattle."

I could only find it used for a female bovine including ox, buffalo, bison, and the domestic species Bos Taurus.

I saw that, too, but the A-H dictionary gives a third meaning: "A domesticated bovine of either sex or any age." (link). Perhaps, it's just an American thing. OTOH, you can go with bovine as a noun, which meaning the OED does cite from the mid-19th century.

I would say cows or cattle too. But usually when I hear the farmer has 100 head of cattle, I think more of steers. Doesn't the farmer keep the cows and the bull separated most of the time anyway, except when it's time to breed the cows?

I once covered a convention of the Holstein-Friesian Cattle Growers Association for the local paper in Utica, NY, back in my newspaper days. So going by that, I guess "cattle" is the best label.

Wordmatic

P.S. Kalleh, we are all packed for our California visit, but will stop to watch the Cubs vs. Phillies tonight. Your Cubbies have been mostly flawless this week, but we are hoping for a repeat of yesterday tonight!

I find this whole discussion weird. The word is obviously "cow". If we're going to insist on using "cow" with its "technical" meaning, then as Kalleh says we have to worry about every other word with a "technical" definition.

We know where this ends: insisting, like they do on QI, that the earth has more than one moon because of some technical definition of the word "moon". Or insisting that raspberries aren't berries, we need to refer to them as "aggregated drupes".

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quote:

Doesn't the farmer keep the cows and the bull separated most of the time anyway, except when it's time to breed the cows?

I can only speak for the Holstein farms where I was raised...but we didn't have any bulls at all. We only had females, and maybe steers. I'll have to ask my dad about the steers. I wonder because 50% of the births must have been males, but I know we had no bulls. We must have sold our steers, but I am really not sure. Our cows were fertilized by a breeder, and not by bulls.

[WM, I was at Thursday's Cubs/Phillies game with our Board of Directors....where, by the way, the Phillies were slaughtered! ]

Well I'm not a farmer - city boy through and through - and to me the word "cow" is a female of the species, the word "bull" is a male and all the other words are the technical ones. What Doesn't exist in my personal lexicon is a word that means animal of the species of undetermined sex.

Technically, of course, you are right. If I saw a large group of people, I wouldn't say "Look at all the women" or "Look at all the men." I'd say, "Look at all the people." However, I think the word "cows" is used by some to mean "cattle," similar to "moot," or other words, being used differently from how it was intended. [The descriptivists will note that I wrote "differently" and not "incorrectly."}

I just thought of something while standing on the platform waiting for the next train: they're called cowboys, not cattleboys or steerboys, etc. We do have cattlemen, but they are different from cowpokes, and also cattle rustlers. No great proof, but it does steer one towards a generic cow, at least in US English.