down with plurals

Makes one, well, ponder.  I knew about deer, and I guess I never gave it a second thought.  I guess I learned it early in grade school where nobody challenges anything.  Tell a second grader something like, it's cats and dogs and ducks for two or more but when you are talking those big ducks with the long necks it's geese, and the kid hardly raises an eyebrow, makes as much sense as anything else his teachers tell them.

But moose too huh?  Well they and deer are large herbivores, but then what about elks?  It is elks isn't it?  I never get a chance to talk much about them, and for all I know maybe it is elk, like there is a herd of elk over there, but I am pretty sure it is elks.  And while I am at it, what the hell is an elk?  Well I assume just a big moose.  But moose are pretty big as it is, maybe elks are like more noble than moose.  The very name elk sounds rather elegant, whereas if you call somebody a big moose, you've got to think he is some kind of galumph.  And isn't the elk so noble that lodges are dedicated to it?  Not so the galumphing moose.  Oh wait a minute there are moose lodges also.  So what's the story with that?  Where there once only moose lodges but then some of the guys in the lodge got a little uppity and formed their own lodges, the elks?

Which is all just dancing around the real issue here, just a way to lull the gentle reader into a comfort zone before he is smashed in the head with the blockbuster thrust of this post.  Why have plurals at all?

I hope you were sitting down.  All those S's, and worse all those other permutations like geese and mice, and then there is that damn thing where S is also possessive so you get things like the cat's mice if it belongs to one cat, but the cats' mice if it belongs to several cats, and who remembers that niggling little detail when then when they are running the rhetorical racecourse?

I have almost no opportunity to discuss elks, even the lodge kind, and not all that much, truth be told, to discuss deer, but I know you do, and I'll wager you have never run into confusion as to how many deer.  If it is one deer, you say a deer, or the deer.  If it is two or three you say two or three deer, an indeterminate number you say some deer.  If you say there are deer in the woods, everybody knows you mean an indeterminate number because you didn't say 'a deer.'

Oh my lord.  Think of all the time we waste in school teaching kids about plurals, when we could be teaching them I don't know how to make bigger and better weapons, missiles for the Russkies, drones for the jihadis.  America can indeed be great again.  I can't wait to get this to Hillary.

Now wait a minute.  The last I heard you needed your truck to get some beer, and now the part is still not there, so why are you sounding so relaxed?

And isn't it passing strange that you would use your truck to get some beer, but if you were going to get some furry or feathered friends it would be some cats of some geese?  But I've had my blockbuster of the morning so I shall get on with my day.