Yesterday I asked you whether you preferred game bird, gamebird, game-bird or maybe you really weren’t the least bit fussed about it. There were a lot of very interesting comments.
And the results were as follows:
A resounding majority (58% of responses) of 362 responses was for gamebird with the next most popular response being indifference (21%).
The comments on this short poll were really quite interesting – thank you all.
And whilst of little importance, the result of this poll has its interest too. As pointed out by you, and noticed by me, dictionaries are pretty clear that it is game birds and not gamebirds. And yet, as far as I can see, two rather prominent groups of people who frequently discuss these birds, probably more frequently than any other groups, namely game shooters and birdwatchers (and I think the scientific literature goes this way too) lean very heavily towards gamebirds rather than game birds.
Perhaps lexicographers should take some notice of this usage?
And perhaps DEFRA should take some notice of the fact that 47 million Pheasants and 10 million Red-legged Partridges released into the countryside each year have ecological impacts which need assessing.
[registration_form]
Lexicographers will now be having a Black Adder-type sausages moment.
less birds or fewer birds?
Dear Mark,
Surely we are not the type of country to be driven by what a small margin of the general population think when statute and published sources tell us otherwise? That would be utter madness …
Dear One – I agree, we should not let the lawyers decide everything.
All three are acceptable – it’s really a matter of preference. However, gamebird is the more modern usage. Compound words tend to start off as two separate words, go through a transitional period of being hyphenated and then end up as one word. At Birdwatch we prefer gamebird. It means there can be no confusion as to what you’re referring to. Killing game birds and killing gamebirds could have two very different meanings …
I hear echoes of the tale of Caroline, her Uncle Jack, and his horse
A useful test in English for establishing the degree to which a compound has fused is to look at its default stress pattern (e.g. compare ‘a Blackbird’ in which ‘black’ carries primary stress and ‘bird’ is unstressed, with ‘a black bird’, in which both ‘black’ and ‘bird’ are equally stressed). Other measures include what if any material you can insert between the constituent parts.
My impression is that in contemporary spoken English game+bird is fully fused (like e.g. game+keeper, but unlike e.g. game+farm) and ideally the spelling should reflect this by using a nonseparable form. Written convention tends to lag behind spoken language though.
Louise – thank you very much. that makes a lot of sense.
The words “game birds” seem always to be defined in legislation, though that needn’t mean they are devoid of natural meaning. It does imply though that, where used, “gamebirds” and game-birds” (I found that too) mean something different because Parliamentary Counsel are perfect beings. No doubt your lawyers can advise on that.
More seriously, I agree with those yesterday that ordinarily we should avoid the word, in the same way as we avoid ‘vermin’.
I think there’s a difference between the use of gamebird (or game bird) and vermin though as I mulled this over last night. Vermin denotes that the species labelled as such is unworthy, inherently flawed/evil, repugnant purely from a prejudicial point of view of someone pursuing a limited personal objective – in this case wanting to have lots of other species to kill for fun typically. It’s like the word witch, it’s a projection of the the user’s ignorance or superstition not a real definition of the subject itself. It’s about attitude not reality, certainly not the material substance of something. On the other hand irrespective of the moral issues around it a pheasant is most definitely shot as a gamebird, that’s a real thing (sadly) whereas vermin isn’t. I really hope that somehow that tortuous (Gilruthian!?!) explanation makes a point. You may hate the use of animals to provide us with meat, but that doesn’t have any bearing on the fact that animals used for it are actually livestock – although people may feel they shouldn’t be that, that’s actually what they are until farming for meat stops. Saying a stoat is vermin doesn’t mean it is, it just means the person saying it is a bit of a dick.
I think I am quoting Bill Bryson, who was despairing of American attitudes to wildlife. It is either game, in which case you shoot it, or it’s vermin, in which case you shoot it. But the same seems to apply to shooters in this country, they think they should be able to decide the category and when and how to kill anything.
Those Americans! Shooting game fish in barrels!