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John M's avatar

Many thanks for sharing your Son's poon tale.

It brought a warm smile of recognition & cherished memory to my heart bits.

My Son, for reasons unknown (even, I suspect, to himself) calls penguins 'paynguins'.

(the 'pen' sound becomes a 'pay').

As parents neither of us felt the need to correct him, as his pronunciation was otherwise 'normal' (well 'normal' within an Australian rendering of the language).

I'm delighted to occasionally find a way to encourage him to say penguin without being 'caught', and (to my ear) there's still the faintest bit of 'pay' in his 'pen'.

He's now 30.

Thank you for your posts, they're truly a joy to read - and from their reading I get the sense that they're a joy to write.*

*except, of course, for the ones when you've got a bug up your arse about something, and these too

(possibly because they're more fun to write?) are a joy in their own way.

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Teresa Pitt's avatar

For some reason it seems that, especially in the US, it is not uncommon for people to refer to all cattle as ‘cows’, regardless of whether they are male or female. I see this frequently on social media and elsewhere. Having spent some time on an Australian grazing property, I know the difference between calves, heifers, cows, bulls and steers, so I’m always very surprised to see an animal that is clearly a bull or a steer being referred to as a cow. It happens quite frequently.

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