My kin would say that's beyond my ken.
Still used in some parts of the world, e.g. here's the Unthanks singing about 'kye'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-2PcpWdHnA
[Lovely song, btw]
I think (Emerson?) Kine was originally the plural of cow, and cattle was any group of domestic animals. Wikipedia seems to agree.
Yeah, the OE was 'cye', although I think, from looking at the OED, that that was a plural of 'cu'. With the NE dialect in the Unthanks' song, a double plural.
KINE TO MOO ALL DAY!
KINE TO MOO ALL NIGHT!
Scots retains the 'cu', and, in some areas, 'kye', too. 'Kine' looks to be a southern English form.
Right. You don't want to bind the mouths of the kine that tread the corn.
"Cattle" of course cognate with "chattel" meaning property. Similar to "stock".
I don't know if there's a difference between a good and a chattel - anyone? All the sources I can find just define "goods and chattels" as "movable personal property" - ie not land or houses.
Handy for poets looking for rhymes: Macaulay's "Horatius":
And droves of mules and asses
Laden with skins of wine,
And endless flocks of goats and sheep,
And endless herds of kine,
And endless trains of wagons
That creaked beneath the weight
Of corn-sacks and of household goods,
Choked every roaring gate.
||
Somebody's random tweet:
In Rio. Airplanes being diverted on flight path over hotel. Am told this is due to large anti aircraft missiles being found in favela raids.
|>
8. I'd always supposed "goods and chattels" was one of those synonym doublets that legal drafters seem to be so fond of, signifying: "In case you were trying for some fancy interpretation of this clause that doesn't mean what it seems to mean, don't bother."
Did you previously think it was a fake word?
Ah, here we are, from a 19th century US legal dictionary:
The term chattels is more comprehensive than that of goods, and will include all animate as well as inanimate property, and also a chattel real, as a lease for years of house or land.
So cattle are chattels, but not goods.
Hencve "kith and kine", n'est-pas?
Hooray! Unfogged is still here today!
I very nearly used the word in a comment earlier this week. Don't remember what it was.
If you had read Ulysses every summer for twenty years you would have known that.
He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favour.
More than necessary, but I needed some beauty this morning.
And the Lord made an bet with Satan to test Job's loyalty and the Lord, for no apparent reason to Job, smote him on the head and again on the ear and pushed him into an thick sauce so as to make Job sticky and vile and then He slew a tenth part of Job's kine and Job calleth out: "Why doth thou slay my kine? Kine are hard to come by. Now I am short kine and I'm not even sure what kine are.
SINE YOUR PITTY ON THE RUNNY KINE.
And here is what Jimmy does with 17 in "Circe"
"(The women's heads coalesce. Old Gummy Granny in sugarloaf hat appears seated on a toadstool, the deathflower of the potato blight on her breast.)
STEPHEN: Aha! I know you, gammer! Hamlet, revenge! The old sow that eats her farrow!
OLD GUMMY GRANNY: (Rocking to and fro) Ireland's sweetheart, the king of Spain's daughter, alanna. Strangers in my house, bad manners to them! (She keens with banshee woe) Ochone! Ochone! Silk of the kine! (She wails) You met with poor old Ireland and how does she stand?"
"Kine" also shows up in "Cyclops" (hoof-and-mouth disease a comtemporary political issue, and like everything else, a metaphor) and of course in "Oxen of the Sun," punned
And "kinetic" is used at least three times in "Ithaca"
I would have to study those for puns.
What is the singular of cattle? Its not cow, because cow only refers to the female singular. But cows and bulls are a certain type of animal. What is one of those animals called?
If you had read Ulysses every summer for twenty years you would have known that.
For obvious reasons, I will only read Ulysses in the fall.
22: A cow. There are lots of species where the specific name for the female (or the male) is also the name for the species as a whole. Goose, hen, dog, etc.
22: Technically, a cow is a female who has had a calf.
What is one of those animals called?
An ox (pl. oxen)?
But, on the larger point, 24 is right. People who work with them say "cow" as a singular noun regardless of sex, age, or how many baby cows have been made.
That is, for certain common values of "cattle" and "ox" they are the same.
28. Last time I looked. Bos primigenius. Ox is usually used to mean a working animal, but I don't think it has to be.
OT: 'Pox Parties' in the Age of Facebook
Is it wrong to wish I had access to some smallpox-infected blankets to mail out to these people?
24: So whats a female bovine animal that has not had a calf called?
Relevant passage:
Other parents on the same message board posted requests for shipments of a variety of chickenpox-infected items - towels, children's clothes, rags. By getting their children to touch the contaminated items or suck on tainted candy, they believe their children will get the stronger immunity that surviving a full-blown natural infection of chickenpox affords, without the hazards they say come with vaccines.
A female whale is called a cow and a cow is cattle and cattle are oxen. Therefore whales are oxen.
17,20:Sometimes I hate that fucker
Shit. Silk of the Kine is an Irish novel published in 1896 ...by L. McManus
26: An ox is specifically a castrated bull. They're used as working animals because they're less stroppy. It's not the generic word for "bovine animal".
So whats a female bovine animal that has not had a calf called?
A heifer, I think.
There are lots of species where the specific name for the female (or the male) is also the name for the species as a whole. Goose, hen, dog, etc.
You may have a point with goose, dog is arguable, but I am calling BS on hen. A hen or a rooster is a chicken.
An ox is specifically a castrated bull.
I thought that was a steer.
41: yeah, I think you're right about hens. Dogs, though, definitely. A female dog is a bitch. And the generic word is dog, unless you're the Queen or similar, in which case it's hound (pronounced hind).
It's my impression that a steer becomes an ox, by aging. Or, more likely, goes to the slaughterhouse.
42: It is. But if you take a steer and have him pull a wagon, he becomes an ox.
If you take a steer and have him work for an insurance company, he becomes an actuary.
If you take an ox and have him steer a wagon, does he become a pull?
And if my grandmother had vertical launch cells, she'd be a destroyer.
And if my grandmother had eels she'd be a hovercraft.
An ox is a male castrated after fully grown. A steer is a male castrated young. A bull is not castrated. A heifer is a female who has not given birth.
In a lot of Asia (Buddhist and Hindu areas) cattle are primarily used for milk and as draft animals and not for meat. Oxen were used as draft animals in parts of the American West until the railroads arrived (~1870 in Minnesota) and remain important in some places today.
This is what I knew already, but Wiki has much more. There are only two surviving bovine species, zebu and cattle, and they can interbreed, and cattle can also interbreed with the muskox.
According to wikipedia, if you have a cow (that is, a female) employed as a draft animal, you can also call it an ox. I've never heard that before, but I've never seen anything but a horse used to pull a wagon.
Dogs, though, definitely. A female dog is a bitch. And the generic word is dog.
A female dog is a bitch, but where I disagree is that "dog" is the standard word for the male dog. Dog is the standard word for dog, regardless of sex. Male dogs have no specific name, unlike, say, bulls or tomcats.
Both English "dog" and Spanish "perro" have extremely murky etymologies (the rest of the Germanic-language words for the animal are cognate to "hound," Latinate to "canis").
51: in that case a steer is what we call a bullock. (bullock = bull minus bollocks is the way to remember it)
And if my grandmother had eels she'd be a hovercraft.
Tactless, Sifu. My grandmother was a martyr to eels.
The castrati of different species have different name -- ox, steer, gelding, capon, wether -- Wiki has more.
An ox is a male castrated after fully grown. A steer is a male castrated young.
I suppose they get more muscle if they keep their balls that long, but are easier to control.
An ox is specifically a castrated bull.
I think you'll find it's more complicated than that...
"Sexually dimorphic behaviors .... may be reduced due to the decrease in hormone levels brought about by neutering. This is especially significant in male cats due to the extreme undesirability of male cat sexual behavior for many pet owners."
Hencve "kith and kine", n'est-pas?
No, it's "kith and kin", meaning friends and relatives.
This doesn't make sense to me. "Kith" isn't the part of the phrase that means relatives, it's the part that means friends.
|| The headline for this story made me think of the I Ching. |>
There's probably a word, somewhere, for a half-steer, half-bull resulting from a botched castration performed by a drunk Dutch sailor. Cows were money and transport and food, so they number of classifications and descriptions is very large.
There are only two surviving bovine species, zebu and cattle
Where are you reading this? Wiktionary gives the biological definition of "bovine" as "of the tribe Bovini," which includes water buffalo, bison, and a number of others. If we move down to just genus Bos, that includes yak, banteng, gaur, and kouprey.
A freemartin is a hermaphrodite bovid, usually born as the twin of a male.
My brother's university roommate grew up on a farm and would bring meat from whatever cow was killed recently to their house for everyone to enjoy. One winter all the neatly wrapped packages were labelled 'Old One Nut' - castrating accident.
There's a yak farm a ways north of here. If Halford comes by, we'll grill up some steaks.
What's the saying about the difference between socialism/communism/capitalism, involving a cow?
67: In capitalism, you have two cows. You sell one and buy an ox. It turns out the ox is actually the same cow you just sold so you are back where you started minus transaction costs. When you complain, the cattle dealer mumbles something about "churn and burn."
I've heard tell that a singular bovine animal, gender indeterminate, is a "beef" (or "head of beef") admitting the plural form "beeves." This usage is probably limited to a particular industrty.
18 for the win. "Kine are hard to come by" is the reason I already knew what "kine" means.
Adam Smith
Was disowned by all his kith,
But he was backed through thick and thin
By all his kin.
Sorry, Bos not Bovid. Not wiki's problem, mine.
The hierarchy is
Family: Bovidae
Subfamily: Bovinae
Genus: Bos
"The evolutionary relationship between the members of the group [Bovinae] is obscure, and their classification into loose tribes rather than formal sub-groups reflects this uncertainty. "
Many bovinae are able to interbreed. I about the ones called antelopes, but there are anecdotal reports of cattle-eland crosses.
Creationist explanation: http://creation.com/identification-of-species-within-the-cattle-monobaramin-kind
I'm not sure about the ones called antelopes, but there are anecdotal reports of cattle-eland crosses.
anecdotal reports of cattle-eland crosses.
Fertile?
Too anecdotal to specify.
This Wiki has recent trollery at the bottom ("Scientific Breakthrough"), possibly introduced recently by someone form Unfogged: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovid_hybrid
I think that there was a divergence in the early Neolithic between the domesticated cow and the Zebu, and those became the only two domesticated species. The Auroch, though, was closely related to the cow thus giving rise to various Auroch back-breeding theories (largely developed by Nazis, but OK) in which I am interested.
I thought for a while that Zebu might be closer to a pre-Neolithic cow, but that seems to be wrong. Apparently Zebu meat tastes bad. The back-bred Auroch meat apparently tastes delicious, though the back-bred Auroch isn't very close to a real Auroch. Bison, of course, is delicious.
53: This is wrong. In dog-breeding contexts, where sex is relevant, 'dog' means male and bitch means female. "We had a new litter of puppies last night, three dogs and two bitches," would, I believe, be a normal comprehensible thing to say.
"Chicken" is funny, because I understand it as an age-linked term as well as a generic. You have a flock of chickens, but for an individual it's a chicken in its youth, and then matures into a cock or a hen. As if the generic term for humans was 'teens'.
Also, bison and cattle can interbreed, and largely have. Apparently only a small portion of US "bison" is purebred and most have cow ancestry somewhere. I haven't determined what this means for tastiness.
You have a flock of chickens, but for an individual it's a chicken in its youth, and then matures into a cock or a hen. As if the generic term for humans was 'teens'.
I thought it was a pullet or cockerel, and then became a hen or a cock.
What's a wether? Is that a castrated ram, or am I in the wrong species altogether?
79: Those too, but I'm pretty sure 'chicken' is a neuter gender 'youthful fowl' in at least some contexts. Come to think of it, it might have become the generic term because young birds would be the numerical bulk of a flock kept for meat --you'd have the mature laying hens, and a rooster or two, but most of the headcount would be young birds to be slaughtered before maturity.
76. Most of the stuff I can find suggests that western cattle and zebus are both now generally regarded as domesticated forms of aurochs, and B. taurus and B. indicus have been sunk as species, rather as Canis familiaris was a few years ago.
This was fun, but it's all there in Wiki. Wiki is not infallible, but it's the first place to look. The report on an eagle-cow hybrid, however, is bogus.
Scientific Breakthrough
Recently, Canadian scientist have begun experimenting with ave-bovid hybrids, the most promising being that between the eagle and the common dairy cow.
83: It does sound like something Zeus might disguise himself as in a playful mood.
This is the best conversation on Unfogged since the time we talked about hay. But I don't have any cattle knowledge to offer.
Canadian scientist have begun experimenting with ave-bovid hybrids, the most promising being that between the eagle and the common dairy cow.
Note to self: Time to start investing in companies that manufacture umbrellas.
This kind of talk makes me want to save up and buy some land outside of town. Or maybe some land in town in one of the areas where all the abandonded houses are.
99 problems but a kith ain't one.
Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers.
Black were her eyes as the berry that grows on the thorn by the wayside,
Black, yet how softly they gleamed beneath the brown shade of her tresses!
Sweet was her breath as the breath of kine that feed in the
meadows.
When in the harvest heat she bore to the reapers at noontide
Flagons of home-brewed ale, ah! fair in sooth was the maiden.
http://www.hwlongfellow.org/poems_poem.php?pid=269 Source. As a child, I had a really hard time accepting this simile.
Come up close, Jackmormon! My breath is sweet!
I don't know how you'd get a sniff of a cow's breath without it being overtaken by the smell of the rest of the cow.
Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers.
In ten states, including California and Oregon, that's a pervy poem unless he himself was 20 or younger when he wrote it.
Don't give me that esthetic Platonic crap. The poet's intentions were clear.
96: One year she flew to Argentina in May and didn't come back until September.
||
Someone just sent me a check for a million dollars. I don't think I've ever seen one of those before.
|>
If it has Ed McMahon's picture on it, you're in for a disappointment.
94. Use one of those boards with a cutout for the cow's head.
I once watched a drunk guy try to feed potato chips to a cow. If they're eating, they won't even bother to lift their heads from the ground.
It's not mine, of course. But a pleasant percentage does come back to my agency for my services -- I just paid my salary for the year somewhat better than twice over.
I accidently typed an extra two zeros on the end of my ATM deposit once. They figured it out and corrected it, but I kept the receipt that printed out. It was fun to look at.
You need to be saving up to dower Sally, after all.
Dower? We're expecting a hefty bride-price. She's worth several cows at this point, and will only get more expensive in future.
98: I saw a check once for something like $9,797.50, or some ridiculous amount. Rather than just rounding up, the utterer had tried to write out "Nine-thousand seven-hundred ninety-seven and 50/100" and totally ran out of room, so they had to send a new check. It was especially annoying, as they were supposed to send their check to the broker, not me.
In the good/bad old days before the collapse of the Irish property market, I occasionally handled cheques or drafts up to a couple of million euros. Nowadays it's a rare transaction that goes over 500k, most are much less.
If only people tipped in such situations.
Cows tip all the time, at least at night.
OT: I'm sort of surprised that the big Nazi terrorist thing in Germany has had so little press here in the US. Group of neo-nazis goes on a decade long murder and bombing spree, suggestions of gross incompetence or worse on the part of elements of Germany's domestic security service, and I've seen very little on it.
Link please? I haven't heard anything about this sort of thing recently.
Neo-Nazi terror scandal grows in Germany
Gives some of the more recent developments.
Cows tip all the time, at least at night.
But they really stiff you at the lunch service.
We're expecting a hefty heifer bride-price. She's worth several cows at this point
I want some aurochs. They look delicious.
For those who, like me, knew nothing about the Germany neo-nazi story, this article gives some more background.
In some respects, it sounds all-too familiar: authorities focus on leftist and Islamic groups, while right-wing terrorists go under the radar. But this story has some extremely weird twists.
In the olden days, people referred to their colleagues as 'kine-orkers'. True fact.
Also true: old TV shows featuring cows were transferred to film using kinescopes.
The Dutch farmhands my dad worked with long ago would call them "kittles." I never found out if the word had any wider currency.
Isn't 'kittle' Scots for weird or unreliable? There's a phrase 'kittle cattle', which means something of the sort.
This was in rural Ontario, so it may have been some kind of Scots-derived pun.
122: yes. Possibly related to "skittish"? Similar meaning anyway.