Deers
The grammar monster in me is going to need a trigger warning next time.
It’s Durrs to you city folk.
Why is the plural the same as singular that does make no sense
Why is English so ridiculous that the plural and singular of deer is the same word? And why do people want to keep it that way?
This isn’t an english specific trait. Lots of languages have something similar.
For instance, in portuguese we do the same for words that end on the letter S.
Ex: Lápis (Pencil), Vírus (Virus), Ônibus (Bus), etc.
The plural of “moose” is also “moose” but it’s not because of English. Moose derives from Algonquian, a Native American language. It kept the same plural ending it had in its original language instead of adopting the normal “s” ending of most English plurals.
I believe the plural of “moose” is actually “meese”.
Goose : Geese :: Moose : Meese
Mouse : Mice :: House : Hice
Go speak a language with gendered nouns and leave English alone
I’m glad that quick answer is there, no way I’m reading that whole thing.
I think the wrong spelling is part of the meme adventure
What if it’s different species of deer? Does it work like fish?
I would say yes
Oh deers
Dirz
Oh deer
Why so many?
I thought this was common knowledge.
To native English speakers, yes. To non-native speakers, this is yet another bizarre rule they just have to memorize.
Hey, did you know your profile is set to appear as a bot and as a result many may be filtering your posts and comments? You can change this in your Lemmy settings.
Or they could just ignore it because the point of language rules is to communicate unambiguously and the meaning of “deers” is pretty clear while “deer” is ambiguous.
I acknowledge that the council has made a decision, but given that it is a stupid-ass decision I’ve elected to ignore it.
John, you can’t license away the plural of deer.
Oh deer
I want to stand in the eye of the deernado and see how long I can last.
I’m willing to bet you’ll get a few bucks.
If none of them are bucks, it could be a tornadoe.
Nice 👏👏👏
Considering the other comment mentioning that they do this to protect their young, probably not very long.
Whatever gets your rocks off.
If someone is lost as I was:
Spoiler
deer protect their young from predators, the young dear are in the center of the circle where the predator can’t get to a group of army ants, separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle. This circle is commonly known as a “death spiral” because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion
Some other animals too. Especially Turkeys can also get into a “death spiral” similar to ants!
Turkeys? Some of us have their own death spiral to worry about.
Death spiral sounds like something you’d do at a metal concert
Turkeys will eventually break out of the circle as they get hungry, they stay in the flock because they feel safer in numbers, and are dumb enough to forget who’s leading. Buy they won’t march on to their own death unless food is incredibly scarce.
Ants just aren’t self aware, and don’t have enough brain cells to realize they could just break off and take a snack break if they wanted.
Deers
Not a word.
It’s just Ant… you don’t have to put the ‘s’, ant is already plural
Unless it’s the human aunt. Like if your mother and father both had a sister named “Sarah” (or if one set of grandparents were very lazy with their naming and your father or mother had two sisters named “Sarah”), you would refer to them collectively as Aunts Sarah.
I actually had a pet moose named Sarah, but have never had a pet ant named Sarah so I can’t confirm this.
Incorrect
Maybe in the original British English it’s not, but in American English, ant is plural
No it isn’t. Ants is the plural for a single ant in the English language flat out. In no region does the word ‘ant’ fall under the Singular Plural rules.
Well maybe I was referring to deer, and not ants. Humor is dead.
Humor is dead.
What was the joke? That your grammar is bad?
The joke is that the meme has bad grammar, deer is plural. Rather than point out the obvious, I say that ant is plural, which is funny because it is both stupid, and draws attention to the deer/s. When my comment wooshes over heads, I follow it up with an even stupider comment, thinking that nobody could possibly be stupid enough to think that there is someone out there that thinks ant is a plural american english version of the British ‘ants’… and then I am once again astonished.
If it makes you feel any better, I got the joke :)
Can we save the ants by brushing them away?
Don’t kid yourself, HonoraryMancunian. If an ant ever got the chance, she’d eat you and everyone you cared about.
Like, literally, no meme.
Maybe drop a cookie in there to tide them over
Do they run in the opposite direction on southern hemisphere?
It all depends if it’s a high pressure deer/ant system or a low pressure one.
Hm, interesting.