Of castrated cows and Three Finger Brown
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New York Mets pitcher Jacob deGrom, who got the win in Game 1 of the National League Division Series against the L.A. Dodgers, received a glowing profile in The New York Times: "Straight Out of Hollywood: The New Guy Outpitches the Ace." When the article first appeared online this morning, it included this line, in the middle of a description of deGrom's "winding and tangled" path to the major leagues:
He also broke a finger castrating a cow, which set him back.
I don't have a screenshot of the article as it originally appeared, and NewsDiffs didn't catch it, but I found out about it on Facebook thanks to MLB historian John Thorn. Very quickly, however, the article was revised to read:
He also broke a finger castrating a calf, which set him back.
And the Times appended this wonderful correction:
An earlier version of this article misidentified the animal Jacob deGrom broke a finger castrating. It was a calf, not a cow.
The problem here was using the word cow to identify a male calf (which was indeed the animal that deGrom helped castrate before spring training last year, when he was still with the Mets' Triple-A affiliate, the Las Vegas 51s). Since a cow is, at least prototypically, an adult female bovine rather than a young male one, the idea of castrating one would seem a bit far-fetched.
But hang on. Let's think of this in terms of lexical markedness. Cow also has a meaning that is more generic than "adult female bovine," which is the word's "marked" meaning. Wikipedia explains:
"Cow" is in general use as a singular for the collective "cattle", despite the objections by those who insist it to be a female-specific term. Although the phrase "that cow is a bull" is absurd from a lexicographic standpoint, the word "cow" is easy to use when a singular is needed and the sex is unknown or irrelevant – when "there is a cow in the road", for example. Further, any herd of fully mature cattle in or near a pasture is statistically likely to consist mostly of cows, so the term is probably accurate even in the restrictive sense. Other than the few bulls needed for breeding, the vast majority of male cattle are castrated as calves and slaughtered for meat before the age of three years. Thus, in a pastured herd, any calves or herd bulls usually are clearly distinguishable from the cows due to distinctively different sizes and clear anatomical differences. Merriam-Webster, a US dictionary, recognizes the sex-nonspecific use of "cow" as an alternate definition, whereas Collins, a UK dictionary, does not.
The secondary definition of cow given in Merriam-Webster is "a domestic bovine animal regardless of sex or age." So under this "unmarked" meaning, the animal that deGrom helped castrate could still be called a cow, right? Well, as Wikipedia points out, that would only really work when "the sex is unknown or irrelevant," and in the case of castration, the sex is certainly known and relevant. So calf, which specifies age but not sex, is indeed a more appropriate term for the Times to use.
I'm reminded of the classic Australian newspaper error from 2011, in which a farmer's remark about "30 sows and pigs" floating down a river was alarmingly misunderstood as "30 thousand pigs." Pig, like cow, can have a generic unmarked meaning that does not specify gender, or it can be used more specifically for males in distinction to sow. So in that case, the default sex of the animal is male, whereas a cow is canonically female (for the reasons given by Wikipedia).
On Facebook, discussion about the Times article meandered into another case of marked vs. unmarked meanings. Peter Wayner wondered whether deGrom's "broken finger healed in a way that gives him a slight edge." John Thorn then posted the following photos of the pitching hand of Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown, who played for the Cubs and other teams in the early 20th century:
As per Wikipedia:
Due to a farm-machinery accident in his youth (April 17, 1888), Brown lost parts of two fingers on his right hand, and in the process gained a colorful nickname. He turned this handicap into an advantage by learning how to grip a baseball in a way that resulted in an exceptional curveball, which broke radically before reaching the plate.
Brown's index finger was mostly lost in the accident, while the other fingers were only damaged (and were never re-set properly). His thumb was not affected. So his "Three Finger" nickname only works if the thumb is not considered a finger. Just like cow, finger has a more general "unmarked" meaning (including the thumb), as well as a more restricted "marked" meaning (excluding the thumb).
Oxford Dictionaries, in the article "Is a thumb a finger?," expresses a preference for the marked non-thumb meaning, suggesting that digit is a better term to encompass all five appendages of the hand. But there are many situations in which we use the unmarked meaning of finger (Peter Wayner mentions the expression "five-finger discount" as an example).
For more on markedness and its relation to hyponymy, see this material prepared by Manfred Krifka. As Krifka observes, cow in its marked meaning ('female bovine'), along with bull ('male bovine'), can serve as a hyponym (subordinate term) to cow in its unmarked meaning ('bovine'). Finger works similarly. That makes cow and finger "auto-hyponyms."
And for a perspective from lexical pragmatics, see Larry Horn's "Toward a New Taxonomy for Pragmatic Inference: Q-Based and R-Based Implicature," in D. Schiffrin (ed.), Meaning, Form and Use in Context (GURT '84), 11-42. Horn treats cases such as cow and finger as "Q-based narrowing," i.e., semantic narrowing based on Grice's Maximum of Quantity. See also, from Neal Whitman, "The Chicken Says 'Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!'" (Literal-Minded, 7/29/04) and "Election Day Special: Are Senators 'Congressmen'?" (Visual Thesaurus, 11/2/10).
Quodlibet said,
October 10, 2015 @ 5:37 pm
Of course, "digit" can also mean "toe", something Oxford notes but doesn't dwell on. And the nickname "Three-digit Brown" might be construed as referring to Brown's weight (in kilograms, presumably) or perhaps IQ.
Lazar said,
October 10, 2015 @ 6:26 pm
"the animal Jacob deGrom broke a finger castrating."
Is this kind of construction allowable in other European languages? Or would they have to rephrase it as "the animal that Jacob deGrom was castrating when he broke a finger" – or maybe "the animal in the castrating of which Jacob deGrom broke a finger"?
Guy said,
October 10, 2015 @ 6:41 pm
I question whether "finger" ever excludes a thumbs as a matter of semantics, as opposed to implicature. It's true you usually wouldn't call a thumb a finger if you knew it were a thumb, and so we would usually infer that something called a finger is not a thumb, just as we would infer that someone who said there were three people in a room intended to convey that there were no more than three, but would anyone ever say "humans usually have a total of eight fingers"?
Walter Underwood said,
October 10, 2015 @ 6:42 pm
This might be one of those times when gendered grammar would help, "die Kuh" vs "der Stier". I have no idea what is used for a herd of them in German.
Ralph Hickok said,
October 10, 2015 @ 7:07 pm
In his song "New Math," Tom Lehrer says that Base 8 is just like Base 10–if you're missing two fingers.
Duncan said,
October 10, 2015 @ 7:16 pm
Context is everything.
1. I'm not a sports fan and thus, while I may possibly have read of "Three-finger Brown" as a famous pitcher in the past, I would not make that immediate association. Similarly, I'm not familiar with Jacob deGrom's story from other sources, so had no personal context there to fall back on while reading the title.
2. This article appeared in my feed immediately after Victor Mair's article on the Chinglish "Please forgive to be incontinent", and indeed, I glanced at the title of this article while still reading his article.
3. Thus, in the context of incontinence and castration, "three finger brown" took on an /entirely/ different meaning. I was left imagining what sorts of effects castration could have on cows (generic gender sense) and that defecation was one of them, but still wondering how "three finger" played into the context, all sorts of weird possibilities there, but, given the LL context as well, figured that was where the story was.
So now the question, the juxtapositioning here was simply accidental, right? You guys don't plan this stuff ahead to maximize clickbait potential, do you? Either way, fortuitous accident or good job! =:^)
Meanwhile, while the actual article turned out to be rather different than imagined, it was of course interesting and informative in its own right, as LL articles generally are (the reason I'm subscribed to the feed). Some years (um, decades…) ago, some friends and I drove past a "dead bovine" at the side of the road, and someone exclaimed "Holy cow!"
"No, dead bull!" was the reply.
To this day, every time someone comes up with that exclamation, I want to reply "No, dead bull!", tho of course when I actually do so, I often have to repeat the story as explanation. Of course "dead bull" remains a conversational "in" marker amoung friends, including new ones who have now heard the story and thus can obliquely reference it as well. =:^)
So it's interesting to see a national newspaper dealing with a similar problem. And the three-finger Brown history and related "finger" discussion is equally informative and interesting, particularly to a relative sports outsider for whom that bit of sports history is unfamiliar.
Guy said,
October 10, 2015 @ 7:16 pm
@Lazar
I think most European languages permit present participial clauses as adjuncts of manner like that but a quick comparison of google results for "what he died doing" versus "lo que murió haciendo", the latter of which returns no results, suggests that they are extraction islands at least in Spanish. I can get results of the form "__ que anda ___endo" but that's really a different thing because "andar + Pres. Part." is an auxiliary verb construction where the present participial clause is a complement of andar, albeit probably resulting from a reanalysis of constructions where that clause was originally an adjunct.
Eric P Smith said,
October 10, 2015 @ 9:16 pm
Like any pianist, I have on each hand 5 fingers labelled 1 to 5, 1 being the thumb. When practising a piece, I work out the fingering, not the fingering and thumbing. "Which finger for this note? – the thumb" is entirely natural English to me.
Jeffrey Kallberg said,
October 10, 2015 @ 9:30 pm
@ Eric
If you were a pianist in mid 19th-century England, the digits on your hand would have been labelled + and 1 to 4, + being the thumb (and 1 the index finger, and so on). Some knowledge of this may inform the Oxford Dictionary preference noted by Ben.
Andrew McCarthy said,
October 10, 2015 @ 9:35 pm
@Lazar: I believe in French, at least, you couldn't get away with dropping the relative pronouns as in English. It'd be more natural to read something like "the animal that Jacob DeGrom broke a finger while castrating" ("l'animal dont Jacob DeGrom se cassa un doigt en le castrant").
Rebecca said,
October 10, 2015 @ 9:48 pm
i think with musical instruments, the distinction comes and goes. For example for the harp, finger numbering includes the thumb, but it's typical in describing the technique to say to close the fingers into the palm, and that's not referring to the thumb, which has a different movement. Similarly, a description of a guitar rest stroke will talk of having your finger follow through and land on the adjacent lower pitched string, which of course, doesn't apply to the thumb
CL Thornett said,
October 11, 2015 @ 12:37 am
This article reminds me of something I read many years ago, criticising the convention that 'he' is the default pronoun. (Far too many years to remember who or where.) It cited a supposed schoolboy essay containing sentences like 'The cow is a mammal. He gives us milk,' the point being not so much that default 'he' as that this reflected a cultural conditioning that 'male' is the default state of being. It almost certainly then referred to Whorf and Sapir.
Although I've used 'singular they' for decades, it still jars to read it as a reference to an individual whose sex/gender is known or clear, and I suppose that constructions like 's/he', alternating pronouns and 'singular they' in any context are jarring to some others. But perhaps after a few more decades, 'If a woman finds a lump in their breast they should see their doctor' will seem as normal as 'If anyone finds a lump in their breast they should see their doctor'. *
*Since it's October and breast cancer campaigns are under way, the example was chosen as a reminder that anyone of any sex/gender/identity can develop breast cancer. Outcomes are generally very good when it is detected and treated at an early stage.
marie-lucie said,
October 11, 2015 @ 2:46 am
@Andrew McCarthy
"the animal that Jacob DeGrom broke a finger while castrating" ("l'animal dont Jacob DeGrom se cassa un doigt en le castrant").
I find both of these sentences strange, but the French one more so than the English one. "L'animal dont …" implies that the rest of the clause will refer to something belonging to the animal, while "un doigt" belongs to the castrator instead. Using "que" instead of "dont" would avoid the possessive reference but sound illiterate rather than foreign, while the use of the "passé simple" in the verb is typical of a much higher, even pedantic register given the non-linguistic context. I don't think it is possible to compose a traditionally "correct" French sentence describing the situation, starting with "l'animal" and using the same lexical items.
marie-lucie said,
October 11, 2015 @ 2:52 am
Here is a possible sentence, using extra elements;
(C'est) l'animal à cause duquel Jacob D se cassa un doigt en le castrant.
(it is) the animal because of which J D broke a finger while castrating him.
The French sentence is traditionally correct, but somewhat heavy and pedantic.
John Swindle said,
October 11, 2015 @ 2:55 am
When I was little I knew "cattle" was more than just cows, so I figured it meant cows and horses.
John said,
October 11, 2015 @ 4:42 am
"Humans have ten fingers and ten toes."
"The Simpsons have yellow skin and only four fingers on each hand."
"The man who shot me had six fingers on his right hand."
Anyone take issue with any of those? 'Cos they all sound fine to me. If someone told me they had eight fingers I'd assume they'd had an accident. Not to mention, I can't imagine anyone believes that the big toe is not a toe (it's right there in the name!), which means that such thumb-exclusionists must consider humans to have eight fingers and ten toes…
peterv said,
October 11, 2015 @ 5:39 am
Eric P Smith:
Yet violinists ignore the thumb, and number from "1" to "4" the four non-thumb fingers of the left hand starting from the index finger. As a pianist, I was immensely confused by this when learning the violin. I still have to consciously decide which number assignment I am using when I start playing either instrument.
BlueLoom said,
October 11, 2015 @ 8:35 am
@peterv
To say nothing of the fact that cellists (who use the same 1-4/index-to-pinkie number assignment as violinists) also have a "fingering" known as thumb position, in which the thumb of the left hand is used as a temporary fret, generally on the two highest strings but, in fact, could be used on any string.
I don't know if bass players (that is, players of the bass viol, not the contemporary usage of "bass" to mean bass electric guitar) use the thumb position, but it would make sense to me if they did. The point of this position is that the fingerboard is too long for the 1-4 fingers to reach the higher notes on the string without an alternative method of stopping the string–that is, alternative to the end of the fingerboard closest to the scroll of the instrument.
Jerry Friedman said,
October 11, 2015 @ 1:45 pm
Languagehat: I asked your question at wordreference.com First I asked about a simpler sentence: "That's the rock that I hurt myself lifting." I got the following translations.
Esa es la roca con la cual me herí al levantarla.
Esa es la piedra en cuyo levantamiento me lesioné.
Then I asked about the original sentence, and one person offered these:
Una versión anterior de este artículo identificaba incorrectamente el animal con el que Jacob deGrom se rompió un dedo al castrarlo. Era un becerro, no una vaca.
Una versión anterior de este artículo identificaba incorrectamente el animal con cuya castración Jacob deGrom se rompió un dedo. Era un becerro, no una vaca.
As you see, there's no exact equivalent to the English construction.
The two people who answered said the one with "con la cual" was "algo enrevesada" ('somewhat backwards', for those following at home). The person who wrote the one about deGrom with "con el que" said it left room for doubt about who castrated whom.
(There were also Basque jokes.)
Coby Lubliner said,
October 11, 2015 @ 3:29 pm
I was surprised to read that "calf… specifies age but not sex." I have always thought of calves as male, heifers as female.
CuConnacht said,
October 11, 2015 @ 3:51 pm
The New York mobster Tommy "Three Finger Brown" Lucchese had lost both a thumb and a forefinger in an industrial accident. No ambiguity there.
Joe Fineman said,
October 11, 2015 @ 7:55 pm
One might also recall the well-known (perhaps the original?) Irish bull: "If ten cows were lying in a field and only one of them was standing up, that one would be the bull".
Horacio said,
October 11, 2015 @ 9:52 pm
@Guy "lo que murió haciendo" sounds unusual, although probably not ungramatical.
'lo que hacía cuando murió' or 'lo que estaba haciendo cuando murió' sound more normal.
@Lazar I
I would say in Spanish 'el animal que castraba JdG cuando se quebtó el dedo', which approximates your first alternative proposal.
Brett said,
October 11, 2015 @ 10:07 pm
When my daughter was two, she fell and hit her head—rather hard, it seemed. To check her vision and comprehension, I asked her how many fingers I was holding up. She replied indignantly (and quite correctly), "Those are thumbs!" which I figured meant she was going to be fine.
Jerry Friedman said,
October 11, 2015 @ 11:00 pm
What strange predictive typing in my head turned "Lazar" into "Languagehat"?
un malpaso said,
October 12, 2015 @ 10:40 am
This is a side issue, but I love The Times' corrections. A recent one apologized for calling Porky Pig "Porky The Pig"
ryanwc said,
October 12, 2015 @ 10:07 pm
>I was surprised to read that "calf… specifies age but not sex." I have always thought of calves as male, heifers as female.
I'm working on a peasant v. pedant joke here but can't quite bring it home.
BJ said,
October 13, 2015 @ 12:47 am
@Walter
Despite grammatical gender, German works basically the same as English in this case. "Die Kuh" is also used with the 'sex is not specified or irrelevant' meaning.
Mark Dunan said,
October 13, 2015 @ 1:39 pm
Baseball fans might also recall the use of "position player" to mean someone who plays any position aside from pitcher. Pitcher is of course a position just like the other eight positions, but pitcher is by far the most unique of the positions: their batting ability is almost completely irrelevant; starting pitchers only play every five days and no longer typically finish the games they start, relief pitchers might pitch every day or two but typically only for one or two innings per game. The relief pitchers don't even sit with the other "position players" in the dugout during the game; they hang around in the bullpen, waiting for the manager to tell them to start warming up in case they need to come into the game.
A good-hitting pitcher is a rarity. Mordecai Brown's lifetime batting average was .206; great for a pitcher but far below the standard for any of the other positions. I wonder what his bat grip looked like.
Anthea Fleming said,
October 14, 2015 @ 12:36 am
In my Australian cattle vocabulary, a single animal of unspecified sex is just a beast. Of course it's cattle, what else would it be? Calves are mostly unspecified – males are bull-calves and females are heifers until the first calf arrives, when they become cows.
And cows are sometimes castrated in a sense – beef producers used to spey (or spay) surplus or sub-standard heifers and fatten them for beef. I haven't heard of it recently. (Likewise the English rustic sow-gelder used to spey gilt i.e. young female pigs).
And finally there is the aberrant beast, the free-martin, the female half of a mixed pair of cattle twins, which becomes infertile and masculinized by the pre-natal effect of her brother's male hormones.
Young castrated male calves are steers when they are young and at age two-plus become bullocks, an expression not heard so much these days, because most are slaughtered while still steers.
Xtifr said,
October 14, 2015 @ 12:57 pm
A long time ago, I noted that "cow" and "bull" are used as modifiers to specify the sex of animals. A bull moose. An alligator cow. As for cattle, though, we have a plural for members of the species, but no traditional generic singular. The use of cow and bull seems like it's modifying a non-existent or missing word: "a bull []." "a [] cow." As Anthea Fleming says above, "of course it's cattle. What else would it be?" These creatures are so important to English-speaking cultures that they basically don't need a name. (Bovine, as BZ used above, is not exactly a common term, and is somewhat ambiguous, as it might be used to refer to other Bovinae.)
As cattle became less central to everyday life of English-speakers, it's not surprising that we've broadened the use of the term "cow" to refer to individuals of the species, regardless of sex, since "of course it's cattle" started to become less true as more people began to work in cities away from livestock of any sort. But the whole phenomenon of this species being all-but-nameless as individuals is certainly interesting and curious.
So, I admit that the theory that the proper name for an individual of the species is the null string is pretty ridiculous, which is why I plan to keep spreading it—it makes people laugh. But I'm curious if anyone can think of similar cases in other languages where an overapplication of logic might lead one to conclude that something has a null name?
Milan said,
October 14, 2015 @ 5:51 pm
@Walter,
"die Kuh" (fem.) is equivalent to English "cow", both in the marked and the unmarked sense. "Der Bulle" or "der Stier" (both masc.) are used to refer to adult male cattle. In addition to that, there is "das Rind" (neutr.) which is used for adult cattle of either sex*. It's a fairly technical term for most people, but used in everyday speech in rural areas, where "die Kuh" is normally restricted to female adults. Using it in the unmarked sense in those communities would reveal you as an ignorant outsider.
*There are also, of course, lots of even more specific terms for calves, heifers, springers, freemartins, oxen, steers/bullocks…
M Briggs said,
October 15, 2015 @ 1:52 am
@ryaanwc:
Question: Who led the pedants’ revolt?
Answer: Which Tyler.
M Briggs said,
October 15, 2015 @ 2:23 am
@ryanwc:
https://twitter.com/mathof1/status/438390315863392256/photo/1