Somewhere between bemoaning the human condition and chatting about celebrity gossip, the internet grabs ahold of a humdrum fact and goes a bit crazy. We’ve quarreled over the colors of a dress and freaked out over chickens large enough to be exhibited in Jurassic Park.
Today, we’re freaking out about “beef.” Did you know the plural form of “beef” is “beeves?” Mind freaking blown. Apparently, most of us have been saying the plural wrong for our entire lives. Leading us to question everything we learned, from preschool-level reading materials, to the language accuracy of those catchy fast-food jingles about “beef patties.”
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It all began with the wokest social media platform on the internet: Tumblr. BuzzFeed News reporter Ryan Broderick stumbled on a post from the site, with a screenshot of a dictionary entry for “Beeves.” Though the best part was several of the users responses, most of which consisted of spazzing out.
“In my 27 years on this Earth, I had never heard of this before. So, I had to look this shit up myself,” Broderick said. “What the fuck,” he added. He then took this news to a fellow BuzzFeeder, who was just as shocked. “I decided to take this all the way to the top. I decided to ask BuzzFeed's copy chief, Emmy Favilla, about it. She was as shocked as I was.”
If you’re now eager to use this the next time you hear about two feuding rappers, beware, “beeves” doesn’t translate. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, you CAN'T use the word "beeves" to refer to things like rap beefs or Twitter beefs — which is literally the only time I could imagine using "beeves."