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Pastimes : SI Grammar and Spelling Lab -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (2111)3/4/1999 5:31:00 PM
From: Ilaine  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 4711
 
Ah, but you miss the beauty of it!

>If the cow is already dead, and is a he, their life is already meaningful.<

1. The writer was talking about eating steak, so of course the cow was already dead. Does he mean, if the cow died of natural causes?

2. Cows are never he, always she. Male cattle are bulls, or steers.

3. If the writer wanted to use a non-gender-specific pronoun, "its" would have worked just fine.

4. Even if you rewrote the sentence to make it grammatical, it still wouldn't make any sense. Why is the cow's life meaningful even if it is dead? Does he mean that just by having lived until it died, the cow's life was meaningful? Let me show you:

"If the cow died of natural causes, then its life was meaningful."

What?!? (Insert interrobang here.)

Edit: knowing the writer, he meant that if it were a bull, the bull's life was meaningful because it was used for stud purposes. Wonder if he'd say the same thing if it were a steer?<g>