Did anyone else learn that "a group of cats is called a Whisper?"
I'm trying to rationlize a false memory(?) Apparently a group of cats is actually a Clowder. Nowhere else on the internet calls it a Whisper?
I swear I was taught this the same day I learned 'a school of fish' and 'a murder of crows.' I remembered it all these years because I'd always think 'whispuuurrrr' in my head.
Help me out of my denial. 😭
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Does anybody actually use these goofy terms for groups of animals? Seems like they mostly exist as a novelty.
People use "pod of dolphins" relatively often.
Well they make some great puns/jokes.
A man regularly was feeding crows in his yard in an attempt to get them to follow and protect him.
He was arrested for attempted murder.
Is there even a reason they exist? Like, is it actually important to a biologist or something to say "herd of cows" instead of "group of cows"?
the explanation i heard once is that they were made by rich hunter fellas so they could determine who else was a rich hunter fella
you've never heard flock of geese? herd of cows? school of fish? these are incredibly common.
Those aren't the ones I'm talking about. Flocks, herds, and schools apply to many different kinds of birds, land animals, and fish, respectively. Why would anyone need to use the word "murder" instead of "flock" for crows? A cackle of hyenas? A conspiracy of lemurs? Let's be serious here. What's wrong with saying a group of lemurs?
Considering your user name and it's interesting history, I'm surprised you aren't in the "language can be fun" camp.
And it can be fun we don't have to limit ourselves to a single word for things.
You can say "group of lemurs" all you want, most people never even find out these constructed terms. The only place you might run into trouble is with the ones that have been around long enough to have entered common usage because people like them a lot, like a murder of crows. Worst case scenario, you call the hundred crows blanketing your yard a flock, and someone tells you that it's a murder and gets a little pissy about it.
But, why are you using flock for crows, and not just group? Because they're birds, obviously. We all know that a group of birds is a flock. How do we know that? Because at some point, people decided that it was useful or fun to have a separate word for birds.
You can trace the etymology of "flock" further back than "murder", because it definitely predates it. But that doesn't make it better. Just older in that usage.
We don't have to make language boring and drab to be understood. Doing so would be a brobdingnagian task with no benefit. If you've never run into a word, or a word usage, you can use other words to communicate and discover what the person means. Like "dude, wtf it's brobdingnagian and why didn't you say massive or gigantic or any of the dozen or so other ways of expressing double plus big"
We don't need more than one word for any given concept, we only need modifiers. But why the fuck would we limit ourselves that way? You really want to go around double-plussing everything? Or should we only use scientific nomenclature for everything?
I know damn good and well that this divide exists. Where people think that language should only contain single terms per concept, and other people think that relying on single terms is limiting too much, and rarely does one side of that convince the other of anything.
But, I'm firmly in the camp of making language and conversation a living thing, full of fun and poetry and interesting thoughts. We can save formal language for formal situations and not suffer any issues the rest of the time.
Yeah, language can be very fun. That's why I'm saying those terms are fun novelties, like a Lemmy username, not really useful in any practical sense.
It was a popular thing in the 14th and 15th centuries to compile these lists of collective nouns for animals - pretty much made up from whole cloth, and definitely as a novelty. Many of them come from the Book of St. Albans.
I dunno, I'd say they're as useful as any other terms.
I think language having the ability to say things in various ways is very practical. if you try to read a book written by someone who only says things in one way all the time, it's probably going to be a dull book.
None of those are goofy terms though...
A flamboyance of flamingos? A business of ferrets? A sloth of bears?
A gay agenda of peacocks
you only think they are goofy because they are more common, so you're used to the terms. How is "murder" of crows any more silly than a "school" of fish?
I guess I just think that there's a marked difference between using collective nouns that already exist in a language and making up brand new ones whole cloth just for the sake of being clever.
Merriam-Webster writes that most terms of venery fell out of use in the 16th century, including a "murder" for crows. It goes on to say that some of the terms in The Book of Saint Albans were "rather fanciful", explaining that the book extended collective nouns to people of specific professions, such as a "poverty" of pipers. It concludes that for lexicographers, many of these do not satisfy criteria for entry by being "used consistently in running prose" without meriting explanation. Some terms that were listed as commonly used were "herd", "flock", "school", and "swarm".
Murder of crows is the only one I've seen used unironically
I've also used an unkindness of ravens.