Here’s a text message exchange I had with my husband who’s back home while I’m in Canada:
N: I picked up a hot hen at Sam’s.
Me: I assume what you mean to say is that you bought a roast chicken for dinner.
He wasn’t trying to be funny. “A hot hen” is a literal translation from Russian. We have no idea why the gigantic birds sold in North America are called chickens and not hens.
“to avoid misgendering them?”
I don’t think it’s a conscious idea, English animal names are a very irregular in that some have sex-neutral generic terms (chicken, horse, pig, goat which all have sex specific names too) while some have more sex specific terms used as generics (cow female and generic, bull uncastrated male, steer castred male)
dog is generic and neutral but while there is a term for female dog (bɪtch) there’s no term for male dog
cat is generic and neutral but while there is a term for a male cat (tom) there’s no term for female cat
There could be historical reasons for some of the gaps (and there might be specialist terms used among breeders I’m talking about general American usage).
🙂
English has a delightful and bewildering array of very specific terms for nearly every livestock animal, so it’s good to have terms like “chicken” that refer to all of them.
I mean, just for pigs, you’ve got
Swine: plural, generic
Sow: female who has produced babies
Boar: intact male
Piglet: juvenile swine of either sex
Gilt: female who has not yet produced babies
Barrow: castrated male
Pork: the meat from swine
—and apparently, “pig” is only used by city folk, and “hog” has different shades of meaning depending on where you live?
“bewildering array of very specific terms for nearly every livestock animal”
I used to know several extra terms related to horses and cows (we had horses, relatives had cows) but I’ve forgotten most of them now…
Interestingly the terms boar and sow originally referred to wild (not feral) and domestic pigs respectively. I found out this when trying to figure out how to translate Polish dzik (wild not feral and a problem in some cities due to a population boom, the ‘official’ translation is ‘wild boar’).*
The Polish for ‘pork’ is actually wieprzowina, which is from wieprz (barrow) the same way the word for beef is wołowina (from wół – steer, ox)
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_boar
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That might explain why some sources give “hog” as a term for intact male swine, and other sources give that as a generic for mature swine.
I remember back when I had horsey friends, being amazed at the number of terms for horses– just nuts the specificity for color, pattern, age, sex, breeding status… Cattle are at least a bit simpler– Beeves, cattle, cow, bull, steer, ox, heifer, calf, yearling, etc.
Apart from those, we have a ton of interesting idioms that we’re losing all context for. I had only the vaguest notion what a “pig in a poke” was, as a kid. Another weird thing old people say. What is a poke? A straw bonnet? Some sort of basketry? It was a little revelation the first time I went to VN. We were walking down a sandy village street, and there, in the shade, stood a motorbike with four weird tubular wicker bundles roped on the back. Looking closer, each one had a snuffling pig face sticking out one end. Pigs in pokes! It’s a real thing! I’m betting my grandparents were not referring to convenient ways to transport swine by motorbike… but it has to be something similar.
The term for a breeding female cat is queen.
Kharking
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A female cat is a queen.
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“female cat is a queen”
I can imagine breeders (or serious cat fanciers) use the term, but I’ve never heard it in everyday usage (though I have heard ‘tom’ any number of times).
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I’ve heard it used by rescue people– somebody finds a kitten on the roadside, they ask around for a “nursing queen” who might foster it.
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Yes. Meat birds are both hens and roosters. So it would be weird to just refer to all of them as hens. Even if you can’t tell the difference once they’ve been plucked, gutted, and packaged.
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I’m not seeing anything stuck in spam or anywhere else.
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I just saw. Incredible. This is very good news for a country that’s been a terrible mess for decades.
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Clarissa:
Which of your multiple languages does your core family
(you, N, and Klara) routinely communicate in at home — Ukrainian, Russian, or English (so Klara will develop proper fluency in her country’s de facto universal language?) Or some polyglot of all three?
The German-Austrian immigrant families that I know through the local Austrian Society of Arizona almost all speak straight English to each other at home (telling me that “it’s just the easiest way to communicate” here in America), although some have also tried to teach their American-born children German as they grow up, so the children will feel an attachment to their European roots. (Some of the children have wanted to learn the family’s native language, others have not been interested because they simply consider themselves “American” without the hyphen.)
I hope this question isn’t too intrusive into your family’s personal affairs, but I am curious about how you deal with your multiple language skills.
Dreidel
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I don’t mind the question in the least. Klara isn’t interested in languages other than English. If she develops an interest, I’ll help her learn but I’m not pushing it. Her English, though, is phenomenal. Her vocabulary is college-level. Her grammar is exquisite.
My sister’s children are multilingual with English, Spanish, French, Russian and Ukrainian. English is the dominant language for them, too, of course.
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Ask him next time if he’s planning on a “hot hen party”. 🙂
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