Re: basic question about integrators in a loop (circle test)

On 23/07/2025 10:41 pm, Liz Tuddenham wrote:

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
 [...]

Oxen are usually castrated males.

>
Some may be castrated males but, according to my dictionary they are
used for draft, for milk or for meat.

>
The dictionaries I've consulted concentrated on the draft animal aspect.
Ignorant people do use words on the basis of their idiosyncratic
understanding of what they mean, but the intelligent ignorant do
generally learn to do better.

 I am amazed that I managed to work in animal husbandry for 30 years and
obtain a degree in biology without your helpful advice to enlighten my
ignorance.

John Larkin has worked in electronics for just as long and still seems to need advice (not that he appreciates it when he gets it).

Unless you are going to tell me
you have succesfully milked a bull,  "Stupid Cow" makes sense.

It's a cross-linguistic pun on oxymoron, and has no other justification. Puns don't make any sense at all, and the proper response to any pun is always derision.

Since I've never been in the bovine artificial insemination business, I
can't ever claim to have "milked" a bull.

 Well I have been in that business and I can assure you that the 'milk'
you get from a bull is not something you would want to waste on your
cornflakes, there are more productive places to put it (and it is very
expensive to buy, if the bull is of good repute).

That I have heard. The boarding school I got sent to in Tasmania for the last fours of my secondary education also looked after a lot of farmer's sons. My parents both had university degrees in chemistry, and chemistry didn't generate nearly as much discussion with my schoolmates.

I have no reason to
doubt that the milk referred to in the dictionary confirms the common
existence of oxen cows.

A dictionary isn't a great place to find out the sex ratio of draft animals. They want to find examples where a word has been used - old examples are interesting, numerous examples much less so.
http://webhome.auburn.edu/~nunnath/engl6240/kucera67.html
gives the first 2200 words in the Kucera-Francis table of word frequencies in American English. It dates from 1967. Dictionaries go back rather further.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney