Re: Missing Singulars

On 2008-12-19 21:32, Richard Wordingham wrote:

> The prohibition against using numerals with <cattle> is news to me. I
> got 12,900 raw Google hits for '20 cattle', and this was number + noun
> in most cases. I got 10,400 raw Google hits for 'five cattle', and a
> bare majority were for number + noun, albeit sometimes part of a
> compound number (e.g. <thirty-five [sic] cattle>), rather than
> collocations such as <five cattle rustlers> or <one in five cattle>.
> The phrase 'five head of cattle' got 5,600 hits, so the two
> constructions are about equally common in writing.

That makes <cattle> and <police> belong to the same category (no offence
to either side).

Piotr