A Plural That We Don’t Count
rogersgeorge on November 2nd, 2020
At least not directly. The word is cattle. We don’t say “thirteen cattle.” We say “thirteen head of cattle.” This linguistic quirk occurred to me when I was reading We Have No Idea, by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson, and they got their name for some livestock wrong. Here’s the guilty passage:
The Pierre Auger Observatory in South America is such a telescope. In 3,000 square kilometers of land, they have 1,600 particle detectors and more than 10,000 cows.
Don’t say “cows” either. It’s “head of cattle.”
Here’s a picture of the place:
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