There's a big truck outside, pumping water out of the parking garage next door. It's making a very loud humming noise, and it's annoying everyone in the office. Except me. I kind of like it. It reminds me of when I was a little kid, and my parents would vacuum during the weekend. I always liked that sound. Not when it first turned on; that part was always abrupt and loud, but after that when, it had been going for a while and became a background hum. Sometimes I'd be watching cartoons, and I'd turn the TV way up so I could hear it over the vacuum, but most of the time the TV was off and there was a tape in the stereo. To this day, Cyndi Lauper reminds me of vacuuming. As does Air Supply and that song Gloria. Not G-L-O-R-I-A Gloria, but the one that woman sang in the eighties.
The vacuum humming was relaxing, and I was always a little bummed out when it stopped. I'm going to miss the noise outside the window, too.
Anyway, I was going to ask a question today. And I still am, so here it is...
What the hell is a cow?
I mean, the females are called cows and the males are called bulls, but what is the name of the species? One of the first things you learn as a kid is the names of animals, and the See 'N Say groups "cow" with "dog" and "cat." But unlike dogs and cats, cows refer specifically to one gender. There's no such thing as a male cow or a female bull. Not to mention cow and bull is used to describe the sexes of a bunch of different animals, like moose, elephants and whales. So what are the things we get our milk and Salisbury steak from officially called? Sure, they're of the genus bos and the subfamily bovinea, but that's not their name. Nobody says C. l. familiaris; they just say "dog."
I said I was going to ask that, because apparently the answer is cattle. It doesn't sound quite right though. I always thought of cattle as a group, but you wouldn't use it to describe just one, like, "Hey, look! A cattle!" So what's the singular noun for cattle? According to the wikipedia article, there isn't one, however both male and female cattle can be referred to as "ox." So dairy cows are oxen?
But the same article says the term "ox" is generally reserved for adult castrated male cattle. I just assumed oxen were a different type of animal within the same family, like the difference between wolves and domesticated dogs. But what do I know, I'm hardly an expert on cattle, oxen, or whatever the hell they are.
Regardless of the proper terminology, cows are female. Somehow that got overlooked when they were making Barnyard. The trailer's been around since at least last summer. It's a movie about cows with guys' voices walking around on two legs with their udders flapping around. That's just wrong on so many levels. Kevin James squirting milk out of his udders is enough to put a kid in therapy for the rest of their life. I still can't figure out how this movie got from pre-production all the way to completion without anyone saying, "Shouldn't we get some actresses to play these cows, or make them bulls maybe?"
I suppose you could say that you're already suspending your belief enough to accept that the cows can talk and stand on their hind legs in the first place, what's wrong with suspending it a bit more? Well to that I say, "My believe can only be suspended so much before it snaps, sir!" Anthropomorphized cows are one thing, but getting their genders wrong? That was the straw that broke the cattle's back.
