English crash course "a Canine" is a dog?

[drew]

So what is wrong with saying dog instead of saying Canine?
I read on internet and some texts always use the word Canine
and they seems to shy away from the word dog.

Elvis Presley sang about a Hound Dog inspired by Big Mama Thornton
Lightnin Hopkins - Lonesome dog blues My Dad bought that one
way back in the 1950 or earlier? 78RPM Gramophone Record

They don't sing about a Canine. So what to make of this crazy
way to treat dogs? Is there some dog Taboo or something?

My English is so bad that I even fail to get the difference between
a dog and a hound dog? Are these different? Is a hound a male dog?

Edit
What would life be without a decent dictionary.

hound dog is one of any of several breeds of dogs trained
to pursue game either by sight or by scent, especially one
with a long face and large drooping ears.

That make sense. When http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hound_Dog_%28song%29
Willie Mae "Big Mama" Thornton sings Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller text
one can see it as metaphor for a male that makes her disappointed
that he is not much to count on. He is always on the hunt for other woman
and nobody she can trust upon?

But despite being around 1950 they did not chose the word canine
so what is so special with canines? Are they better breed or something?

[Adrian Bell]

A canine can also be a wolf, coyote, jackal, fox etc..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesti...ed_terminology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canidae

[drew]

Ah thanks so it is a kind of Latin generic word
for a whole variety. But I doubt that any of these
would be easy to have as hound dogs as a hunting
buddy for us humans? wolf, coyote, jackal, fox

They look cool on pictures but are not easy to tame.

Took scientist some 25 generations to tame Russian
Silver Foxes well enough that they could be family pets?

So I am still surprised that they prefer to use that word
then to just say dogs. Do they want to sound sophisticated
or learned?

I would be very surprised if an average family that talks
about getting a pet animal say. Let's get a canine instead
of a feline pet

[David]

Pretty well nobody says 'canines' when they mean 'dogs' - IMHO only.

[Adrian Bell]

What about this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-9_%28Doctor_Who%29

[David]

Very interesting All dogs have canine teeth by the way.

[chrisretusn]

Originally Posted by David

Very interesting All dogs have canine teeth by the way.

Also known as dog teeth is many places.


I've always called a dog a dog, American English is my native language. I've never heard anyone use the word canine in place of dog, at least until today.

We currently have two dogs. Saying that as "We currently have two canines" just doesn't do it for me. We had seven a while back, two *****es, the dam had a litter of four. All but one of the puppies, a dog, and the sire were given away.

I see the forum censor code is working. That should have been bıtches

[drew]

That the software did that censoring automatically
where my first thought when I saw the TV program
that used the word Canine for the dogs they used.

The original name of the TV series is like this
Customs - 205. S02E05. in our list of TV on that local channel.
English? program they had a thing on Gatwick Airport Customs.

They used dogs to find passengers with drugs.
www.gatwickairport.com/flights/arrivals/

just a hasty link not really related. Our channels show a lot of such
due to cheap to buy. From all over the AngloAmerican speaking world.
Australia, Canada, England USA, NewZ. so one get most of what they say
unless they speak in accents that one are not used to.

I use them as a kind of language practice to get used to how English
sounds in case one want to travel to Canada on vacation whatever.

I would never go to England it is almost impossible to get what they say.

*Friendly Smile*

[David]

I currently only have one guard dog. Here is a picture of her.

Not a very good picture I am afraid

[kijinbear]

Calling dogs "canine" is a bit like calling men and women "male" and "female". I feel irritated every time someone refers to a person like that. And not just because they're using adjectives as nouns.

In my dictionary, "canine" is what you use when you want to talk about the Canidae family of animals (or more narrowly the Canis genus), or when you want to describe some teeth of dogs. Using that word to refer to common dogs just makes you sound like a douchebag. Likewise, "male" and "female" is for male and female animals (not humans), e.g. "a male chimpanzee", or when you talk about the private parts of men and women. Using those words to refer to people just doesn't sound appropriate to me.

For some reason, cops seem to love using such words, bring the K-9, the suspect is a Caucasian female, 5'6" tall, etc. etc.

[drew]

Caucasian

Yes having been brought up with Black White TV
like Perry Mason, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Mason
He loved to use such words too. So it seems to be a typical
"legal" way to talk English. I am retired male Caucasian 6feet and 6inches
whatever height I have in AngloAmerican.

Being preteen and not getting English well enough we where lucky
them had subtitles one can read what they talked about.

So most likely Perry Mason would say that Drew own a female Canine and not a B***hy dog

we loved this guy even more http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbo
but he had strong competition from Roger Moore

[Tsunami]

Canine will be used in medical jargon usually. A local veterinary here in town uses the word "canine clinic" (translated in Spanish obviously) but I'm quite confident towards his customers he'll accept the word "dog"

Also, the Latin words tend to be used in animal passports which are to be shown at bordercrossings in some cases to prove the animal has received vaccination against certain diseases. For example an animal passport will use "felix domesticus" in some cases which is basically Latin for a simple house cat. (the passport will ironically not contain a picture of the pet but a chip number if they have a chip, and dates of vaccinations. But for example my dog does not have his picture in his passport)

[Tsunami]

PS: As some state above correctly, canine can apply to animals related to dog which cannot be kept as a pet. If I am correctly remembering biology classes, we talk about for example a wolf. Another example is the tiger and panther being in the same class as the cat (felix domesticus is a cat you can own as a pet, pretty sure the word "felix" will be used for tigers and panthers with another adjective added)

The purpose of applying such terms outside of veterinary jargon is a question mark to me. WHy for example the pet passports don't simply state "house cat" or "cat" ?? Maybe it varies per country where the passport is issued but for sure in my native country they'll use Latin names for a simple dog or cat.

[robert@fm]

This is an interesting thread!

To my mind, chrisretusn's post shows a good point (also made in a post by redmerlyn some years ago); "b*tch" is censored because some regard it as offensive, but it shouldn't really be because it's also the correct technical term for "female dog". It's been used on prime-time BBC television in shows which are likely to have children watching. It's a bit like censoring "frog" because it can be insulting to the French.

London has the Isle of Dogs (an artificial eyot created by joining the two sides of the Poplar Peninsula with a ship canal), the name of which is probably a pun (it was an isle of docks), and the tropics also have the Canary Isles which means "isles of dogs". Hence the canary, which confusingly is actually a bird.

As an aside, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band reformed in 2004 (with new members to replace those who had died, such as Viv Stanshall) and released an album called Pour l'Amour des Chiens, which is French for "For the Love of Dogs"; the cover art was of a dog skull covered with white icing and festooned with hundreds and thousands (those little multicoloured sugar sprinkles used to decorate cakes). I don't know if this was a reference to the band name, but it was certainly a send-up of Damian Hirst's "sculpture" For the Love of God, which is a human skull encrusted with diamonds.

As for "hound", according to season 2, episode 2 of the BBC series Sherlock, this is a somewhat archaic word which is seldom used nowadays. (That episode had Mr. Holmes wondering why Henry Knight persistently used such an odd word instead of "dog". It turned out to be an important clue.)

[kijinbear]

Originally Posted by Tsunami

The purpose of applying such terms outside of veterinary jargon is a question mark to me. WHy for example the pet passports don't simply state "house cat" or "cat" ?? Maybe it varies per country where the passport is issued but for sure in my native country they'll use Latin names for a simple dog or cat.

Maybe, in passports, it makes sense to use Latin names for species, because common words like "dog" or "cat" might be ambiguous. For example, some cultures might have a different idea of what counts as a dog and what doesn't. If you try to import a wolf from a culture that calls both dogs and wolves by their equivalent of the English word "dog", there might be a problem. Latin names, on the other hand, are widely used by scientists all over the world, so there is little room for ambiguity.

By the way, I think the scientific name for cats begins with Felis, not Felix. (Felix means "lucky" in Latin.)