Fancy restaurants feel the need to add adjectives to let you know “that’s no ordinary ingredient.” It’s not a tomato, it’s an heirloom tomato. It’s not a lemon, it’s a Meyer lemon. But they often take it too far, adding purely redundant descriptors, such as “baked bread.” One I saw recently took the moist cake: It was a garden salad of fresh mesclun with a “hen’s egg.” As opposed to what, a cock’s egg?

Seeing that menu in the run-up to Thanksgiving was a lucky coincidence, because it got me thinking of words for male and female animals. Fun word facts abound when it comes to different sexes of animals. Obviously, there’s a word for a female dog: I will never get over how mortified I was as a child when, before knowing where the b-word actually came from, my mother stopped another Southern lady in the park and asked if her dog was a bitch. But there are many more. Did you know that both a female crab and a female donkey can be called a jenny? A female hawk is just called a hawk, but her mating partner is called a tiercel. A pair of rabbits, of course, are a jack and a jill, and, pleasingly, a pair of seahorses are a seamare and a seastallion. Geese you’ve heard, because what’s good for the goose is, well, you know.