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single head of cattle problem


  • I often find myself thinking, "I don't know the name of such-and-such a concept, but it's super important, I'm sure there is one and I'm just ignorant."
  • Then I spend a bunch of time searching for the name and can't find it.
  • Over time I realized there are a lot more super important concepts than there are names.
  • Now I have a good illustrating example.
    • en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cattle&oldid=1163836666#Singular_terminology_issue
      • "Cattle" can only be used in the plural and not in the singular: it is a plurale tantum. Thus one may refer to "three cattle" or "some cattle", but not "one cattle". "One head of cattle" is a valid though periphrastic way to refer to one animal of indeterminate or unknown age and sex; otherwise no universally used single-word singular form of cattle exists in modern English, other than the sex- and age-specific terms such as cow, bull, steer and heifer.

  • If over 500 years of modern English we haven't picked a word for "single cattle" then we may not have picked a word for whatever I'm looking for at the moment.
  • (Sidenote: this might be one reason cattle not pets clicks as a phrase, "cattle" literally cannot be singularized.)

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