Talk:cow milk

Request for deletion

The following information passed a request for deletion.

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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I think I would have speedy deleted this, but it has about 10 linked pages. I always saw cows' milk FWIW. Mglovesfun (talk) 23:11, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Move to RfV. Seems purely empirical. DCDuring TALK 00:18, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Right or wrong, but there seems to be plenty of usage, at least judging by a Google search. A common misspelling? --Hekaheka 05:11, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

No, it's sum of parts. Milk from a cow. How sum of parts can you get? Mglovesfun (talk) 14:27, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

If there is some kind of question, such as you raised, about whether it is "cowmilk", "cow-milk", "cow milk", "cow's milk", or "cows' milk", perhaps users need our help in selecting the right word both in speech and in writing. You don't want them to make mistakes, do you? As we have dispensed with CFI and increasingly rely on intuition, voting, and the principle of helping users select forms of expression, we would seem to need this. DCDuring TALK 15:21, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

Of course, you can also buy cat milk - which isn't milk from cats, but non-cow milk for cats. SemperBlotto 15:24, 6 February 2010 (UTC)

I would say it's potentially a retronym used by vegans to distinguish it from rice milk, soy milk, hazelnut milk, etc. in the same way that acoustic guitar is "sum of parts" but necessary for the distinction from the more recent electric guitar. --EncycloPetey 16:46, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

I still don't see any merit in this. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:04, 8 February 2010 (UTC)

The difference is that while everyone talks about acoustic guitars, I've never heard anyone refer to cow milk. Ƿidsiþ 17:02, 23 February 2010 (UTC)

• Sadly kept per WT:COALMINE. cowmilk is certainly attestable. Adding now --Rising Sun talk? contributions 13:27, 21 May 2010 (UTC)