Is there a word for that?

[Neutros the Radioactive Dragon]

Porter, you're so ungrateful. Do you know that there are little children in China right now who don't even have needless synonyms and ludicrously-specific words?

You're sure about that?    

[BlackBlade]

Porter, you're so ungrateful. Do you know that there are little children in China right now who don't even have needless synonyms and ludicrously-specific words?

They also don't have their gorgeous calligraphic system for writing because they have to pay all superfluous strokes and character radicals in taxes to the communist party.  Leaving only that ugly, albeit easier to write version.

[Porter]

I can't tell if that's a joke or not.

It's not like English, or any other spoken language except for Esperanto, was designed.

It's a joke that's only funny because it's not really a joke.

Redeem? Redeeming angel works, I think.

In the context of Monte Cristo, it really does.

Porter, you're so ungrateful. Do you know that there are little children in China right now who don't even have needless synonyms and ludicrously-specific words?

Maybe I'll donate defenestration to them.

[Jonathon]

It's a joke that's only funny because it's not really a joke.

Huh? How so?

[rivka]

Redeem? Redeeming angel works, I think.

In the context of Monte Cristo, it really does.

An' I helped!

Also, you can't give away defenestrate. I love that word!

[Neutros the Radioactive Dragon]

*throws rivka out window*

[rivka]

*lands on trampoline, bounces back to window, punches assailant in the face*

[Porter]

It's a joke that's only funny because it's not really a joke.

Huh? How so?

While I normally think that English's superfluity of redundancy to be ungood, I really did get annoyed when I couldn't think of an appropriate word for that specific concept.  My inconsistency is funny.  At least to me.

---

BTW, I came up with a word that for me works better: recompensing.

[The Genuine]

I learned a new word today:

tret  (trɛt)

— n
commerce  (formerly) an allowance according to weight granted to purchasers for waste due to transportation. It was calculated after deduction for tare

[Porter]

I really wish that there were a simple word, analogous to goat or duck, to describe the domesticated bovine that did not primarily indicate gender, like cow does.

[Jonathon]

I think the "primarily" there might be arguable. I think in many people's minds, cow IS the default word, and it just happens to pull double duty as the term for a female cow, too. I thought this post on the subject was pretty interesting. And someone notes in this comment that dog technically has the same problem: dog refers to the male of the species, at least among breeders.

[Annie Subjunctive]

I think it might be due to how close we are to cattle - animals like kangaroos can be called by a generic name because the differences among kangaroos don't matter much to us as humans. And even cats - we see them every day but whether one is male or female doesn't matter for most of our interactions with them.

If you work with cattle, though, their age, sex and reproductive status totally changes their role in your life. Most ranchers who raise cattle are cow/calf operations - that means that their stock consists of breeding cows, maybe a few bulls (for many, their interaction with bulls is only when they hire them at breeding time), and calves, which for your purposes are either heifers (you'll keep them to become breeding cows) or steers (which you'll sell at auction). (Before they were steers, they were bull calves - so you have those two categories to distinguish too) So what you do every day is not sufficiently described with a generic term for one of the animals. You're either going to go out and find pairs (cow/calf pairs), check cows, vaccinate heifers, round up steers, or castrate bull calves. Other people in the industry will work with other demographics - breeders will work with bulls, and stockyards will work with steers. Because our interactions with them are so intricately tied up with their reproductive lives, we have need for a lot more than one word. And because our industry has been so specialized, it's been a long time since someone needed to communicate about an activity involving a mixed group of cows, bulls, heifers and steers.

I've noticed the same thing among people who work with rarer animals. Us outsiders wouldn't hesitate to refer to "sheep," but my friends who live on sheep ranches talk about ewes, rams, lambs and wethers.

[Porter]

Exactly.  With goats, we talk about kids, does, bucks, and wethers.  But we also use goats to encompass them all. For domesticated bovines, we talk about calves, cows, bulls, and steers, but have no word analogous to goat.

For me, cattle is also unsatisfactory, because of the more general usages the word can take, such as minor vs. major cattle in the KJV.

Besides being obnoxiously unwieldy, domesticated bovine also has problems, with how domesticated farm-raised bison are getting.

[Porter]

One other option is is to call them beefs or beeves, but I find that distasteful as it seems to imply that they're nothing more than T-bone steaks that just haven't been butchered yet.  Which, in a sense, is what they are, but I still find it distasteful.

I think that those in the cattle industry (which we are not -- we raised a whole whopping 2 steer from calf this year) might simply refer to them as heads, as in "2000 heads [of cattle]".  That also does not work for our purposes, as our little farm has much more diversity, and the head count of our livestock is not the same as the number of cattle we have.

[The Genuine]

Singular terminology issue

Cattle can only be used in the plural and not in the singular: it is a plurale tantum. Thus one may refer to "three cattle" or "some cattle", but not "one cattle". There is no universally used singular form in modern English of "cattle", other than the sex- and age-specific terms such as cow, bull, steer and heifer. Historically, "ox" was a non-gender-specific term for adult cattle, but generally this is now used only for draft cattle, especially adult castrated males. The term is also incorporated into the names of other species such as the musk ox and "grunting ox" (yak), and is used in some areas to describe certain cattle products such as ox-hide and ox-tail.

"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 U.S. dictionary, recognizes the non-sex-specific use of "cow" as an alternate definition, whereas Collins, a UK dictionary, does not.

Colloquially, more general non-specific terms may denote cattle when a singular form is needed. Australian, New Zealand and British farmers use the term "beast" or "cattle beast". "Bovine" is also used in Britain. The term "critter" is common in the western United States and Canada, particularly when referring to young cattle. In some areas of the American South (particularly the Appalachian region), where both dairy and beef cattle are present, an individual animal was once called a "beef critter", though that term is becoming archaic.

[Porter]

The more I talk, the more it becomes apparent that I was correct to bring this up in the ludicrously-specific word thread.

[Porter]

Further, any herd of fully mature cattle in or near a pasture is statistically likely to consist mostly of cows

Around here, if you see a one or two in a field, it is likely a steer. 

There are a lot of laws in Oregon designed, in essence, to keep Oregon looking like Oregon and not turning into another California.  You can get large tax breaks on your land if you use it for "farming".  It is very common for people with a few acres in the country to fence it off and raise steer calves they buy from a local dairy.  You get the worthless (to the dairies) calves/steer for free, they're very little trouble, you save a lot on taxes, and can make a few bucks on the beef as well.

[Annie Subjunctive]

I think that those in the cattle industry (which we are not -- we raised a whole whopping 2 steer from calf this year) might simply refer to them as heads, as in "2000 heads [of cattle]".  That also does not work for our purposes, as our little farm has much more diversity, and the head count of our livestock is not the same as the number of cattle we have.

What I was trying to point out is that people in the industry call them cows, steers or heifers. I don't know any ranchers who call them heads, though they do say head of.

I think you'll probably be just fine if you call them cows.

[pooka]

What is the Linnaean nomenclature?  

This  reminds me of the claim that such and such culture has n-hundred words for snow.  White people have a dozen words for cow, and they still aren't satisfied.

You could also refer to them by breed.  If you don't know the breed, you get to sound like a city dweller and call them cows.

Maybe you can take a cue from man/woman/human and call them hucows.  My mother likes to say things like this.  She thinks it's very clever.

[Porter]

I think you'll probably be just fine if you call them cows.

You underestimate my neurosis.

[pooka]

Whoa:

Cattle did not originate as the term for bovine animals. It was borrowed from Old French catel, itself from Latin caput, head, and originally meant movable personal property, especially livestock of any kind, as opposed to real property (the land, to also include wild or small free-roaming animals such as chickens, which would be sold as part of the land).[9] The word is closely related to "chattel" (a unit of personal property) and "capital" in the economic sense.[10][11] The term replaced earlier Old English feoh "cattle, property" (cf. German: Vieh, Gothic: faihu).

  From wikipedia.

[Annie Subjunctive]

Or, what Jonathon already said

[Jonathon]

I said that?

[Annie Subjunctive]

You could also refer to them by breed.  If you don't know the breed, you get to sound like a city dweller and call them cows.

Um, country people would be far more likely to call them "cows" than to call them by their breed. Probably because all of the cattle on a given ranch are typically the same breed. (On ranches where this isn't the case, like where they raise black baldies by crossing Herefords and Black Angus, they will call them by the breed when they need to differentiate but they'll say things like "I've gotta go get the Hereford heifers in before it gets dark.")

[pooka]

Yeah.  Jesse linked to a rather large block of text from wikipedia, which I recognized as I read further down.