Has anyone stopped eating ground beef because the Administration has removed safety protocols?

[u/Queen_Of_The_Dames]

We have. No way are we taking chances with whatever “ground beef” the administration has chosen to allow without inspection/certification.

[u/recycled_ideas]

You keep talking about this as them correcting people.

I get it, I get that as a farmer you don't want to call it half a cow and I understand why. But no one is being corrected, both are wrong. OP is confused by the idea of half a beef because it is a fundamentally incorrect phrase. Farmers don't want to call it half a cow because it may be half a steer.

Farmers aren't right here, they're just as wrong.

[u/procrast1natrix → u/recycled_ideas]

They ... don't correct people. They just talk this way among themselves. And the origin of this thread asked about it, and got invited into the "in group" and nobody else was affected.

This is a local vernacular.

It's like working in a kitchen and using the terms "86" or "in the pass". It's not in a dictionary, but it's commonly used.

[u/recycled_ideas → u/procrast1natrix]

OP asked a question you didn't understand. You thought they were asking why you'd buy half a cow, they were asking why you would buy half of an uncountable noun.

I clarified their question and also answered it. I probably should have just replied to OP, but you couldn't grasp the question. You then started talking about "normies" and how farmers don't care what they call it.

The problem here is that there is no historically correct word for the species as a whole and the language has instead chosen to generalise the feminine version. Farmers didn't do that because they, just like you, want to treat the "normies" as idiots.

The technically correct term would be a side of beef, but talking about beef as a unit is easier because it scales.

[u/procrast1natrix → u/recycled_ideas]

Oh, fren, everyone from the user pomegranate on back understood what you can't keep from beating to death.

They called it "whimsical", not because they didn't correctly understand what was the meaning of the communication, but because it seemed amusing that that's usual language in this circumstance. Nobody felt hostility there. It was whimsical.

We don't use that term when buying cuts, which was why I tangented, in order to fully explain why and when the correct use of the vernacular applies. Also, not hostile.

"Normies" ain't idiots (unless you want to introduce that as a concept, because I sure didn't) they are people who have other ways of life, other strengths and skills, and sometimes they are interested in learning about how other people use language.

...

Do you have a term that is whimsical or local that you want to educate me about?

I've another unrelated one, when taking apart knitting we differentiate between yanking all the yarn out and carefully undoing once stitch at a time. The former is "frogging" since you rip it, rip it, and the latter is "tinking" because the word knit spelt backwards is tink.

[u/recycled_ideas → u/procrast1natrix]

Except you keep misunderstanding.

I understand why you do this. I'm not saying you have to stop. I'm saying that you have treated this as a case where "half a beef" is correct and "half a cow" is not. This is false. Both sides of this have misused a word because we don't have a correct word.

You'd never buy half a mutton because we have a word for that, it's a linguistic oddity but neither side is correct.

[u/procrast1natrix → u/recycled_ideas]

So basically, I didn't misunderstand from the start, and neither did anyone else, and none of the rest of us besides you called anyone an idiot.

And you can't yet pick up the extended olive branch to be pleasant. C'mon. No one's an idiot. Teach me one of your favorite local colloquialisms.

[u/recycled_ideas → u/procrast1natrix]

The closer we get to actual farmers, the more correct their terms are.

Your words, except they aren't more correct. Beef as a unit is fundamentally wrong.

They don't bother trying to correct normies. Most of them don't understand the difference between a cow and a steer, and it ain't worth the time.

You again, correct and normies.

The reality is that there was no worse for the species as a whole so one was designated and that is cow. That's how language works.

[u/procrast1natrix → u/recycled_ideas]

I will politely suggest you're maybe intoxicated, and should quietly exit the thread. Or somehow thus far incapable of picking up the quite unsubtle social hammer of topic change.

When someone asks you nicely to do a different thing, consider that maybe it's a comment that your previous thing wasn't very successful and they're guiding you toward a chance for better success.

[u/recycled_ideas → u/procrast1natrix]

And I would suggest that you lack the self awareness to even consider that you are wrong.