What should you call a ‘boy cow’ and a ‘lady dog’?
‘That’s a boy cow,’ said a woman in the train to a little girl, adding in an aside to an adult companion: ‘I didn’t use the other word because it’s too much like…’ The other word must have been bullock and the word it too much resembled was bollock. Bollock used to be spelt ballock. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce introduces the question of whether ballocks is the only example of the dual number in English. In Irish English it is certainly used in the plural form with singular concord. Ballocks was in standard use up to the 17th century, after which it was
