This discussion of lace/laces brings to mind a wild life film I saw last night about polecats (which I discovered is a relative of weasels). "We must exterminate the polecat" means that the game keeper wants to reduce the predators that are eating his pheasant. He's not talking about one polecat and one pheasant, but about lots of both. So an animal species name can be singular in form, polecat or pheasant, but refer to the species as a whole. Or the species name can be used to describe this one particular polecat or this one particular pheasant. Although in current American English practice I think most biologists would say "polecats are recovering in numbers under protected status", or "pheasants are an introduced species".
I don't always trust my spell checker. And it rejects many lace words. Lorelei - To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] containing the line: unsubscribe lace [email protected]. For help, write to [email protected]. Photo site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lacemaker/sets/
