Re: Flesh Eating Names

On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 14:42 -0400, Mark J, Read wrote:

> On an only-vaguely-related note, what's the sex-neutral term in
> English for a "bull"/"cow"/bovine thingy?   I read somewhere once that
> "ox" used to fill that role before being co-opted to refer to a
> different subcategory of the same species.  What's the singular of
> "cattle"?
Neat. It's mostly dialect these days -- they call a cowshed a neathouse
on the Suffolk-Norfolk border -- but neat's-foot oil and neat's tongue
are generally known. But you're right about "ox" originally being usable
in that sense; indeed, it still is, though mostly in compounds like
ox-tongue, ox-hide, ox-pecker.