These are "poetic terms", people usually use "flock of X",
which is far more approachable. Using archaic terms
with collective nouns is uncommon even in literary prose:
I heard a story on the radio about this a while back. The conclusion was that most of these terms were never commonly used. It was mostly smart bored people making things up to amuse other smart bored people (mostly nobility as they were the only ones who had wealth and time to waste on such nonsense). That doesn't mean that none of them were used or that it isn't fun, but don't put too much meaning into it.
That makes sense and I (native English speaker) had always assumed it was something like that.
I wish people would present this as what it is (a childish word game) rather than legitimately “part of English”, so that learners of English don’t think they have to memorize these and actually use them…
Some of them are, some not as much. There are certainly more obvious poetic devices like a "murder of crows" yet there are still many other collective nouns that are more "legitimately" part of English - pack, herd, pod, flock, swarm, and school for example. You don't have to know these terms as using 'group' would be understood - but they are common enough in books / documentaries.
Funny. I remember from school this being a mere curiosity and definitely not part of any the curriculum or book, although a couple teachers were awfully pedantic about it and wanted us to memorize some of those, while at the same time decrying its lack of usage, correlating with "kids these days" caring only about trendy lingo.
Funny enough, this is probably the equivalent of modern "memes", but a few centuries (decades?) before...
Teachers wasted so much time making us memorize so much made up shit back in the day. I swear it's just because having minors occupied during the day is necessary for society to function. The actual stuff you need to learn could be squeezed into half as many years as schooling lasts, or half as many hours each day.
I was disappointed that the article, despite it's title, never actually tells us how these group names came about. From some reading a while back, it seems that many started to be used after the 1968 book, An Exaltation of Larks, became popular. It was written by the Inside the Actors Studio host James Lipton, and includes some terms he made up himself, as far as I can tell (the back cover states " In it you will find more than 1,100 resurrected or newly minted contributions...").
In the article it is shown that many of them were already present in one of the first printed books, in 1486: "The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms".
To go further back in time would be possible only for words that would happen to be mentioned in some ancient manuscripts, which is not very likely for words designating flocks of birds.
Oddly enough, the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, which are among the few sources of news of events in the 600-1000 period, spends considerable ink on describing unusual actions of flocks of birds. That and ecclesiastical events. You do get the occasional account of wars, kings, land deeds, etc. but the frequent mention of birds is odd. Perhaps they were seen as portentous?
English grammar and phonology is also much more complicated than what people give it credit for. There is also a general confusion between descriptive and prescriptive rules.
The same goes for other languages, like Italian.
My impression is that the main difference between English and other languages is the lack of an (central) authority that can tell you what the language "is" and what it "isn't" and that gives off the feeling that there isn't much to say about the language other than random stuff arbitrary people make up.
But I'm pretty sure there are tons of people who study the languages (including English!) In good faith with professionalism and sobriety.
All language is "random stuff arbitrary people make up".
"Rules" are just discovered patterns in the arbitrariness of language, convenient ways to capture and communicate how most people within a certain linguistic context express a certain idea. They are point-in-time observations of an evolving natural system, sharing much more in common with aphorisms like "April showers bring May flowers" than with the law of gravity or the tax code.
The English language is whatever English speakers and hearers agree it is. No linguistic "authority" can stop the inexorable evolution of language.
(Language evolution has dramatically slowed, but that's because of the printing press, the radio, the television, and the Internet creating massively larger and more durable linguistic communities than ever existed before, not because of authority.)
And to the original point of this thread... all of these so-called names for groups are nonsense. "A group of owls is called a parliament"... by whom? No one ever. Thus a group of owls is not called a parliament or a stare or a hoot or anything else cute. A group of owls doesn't have a name because owls don't form groups. In the unlikely event someone discovered a large group of owls together, I am quite certain they would call it a "flock", no matter what someone who thought they were clever wrote in a book.
Yeah, this is a trigger for me. (:
Dr. Geoff Lindsey is a great reference. Another is John McWhorter, specifically his books The Power of Babel and Words on the Move.
Linguists are scientists of the natural world, not law-makers.
> "Rules" are just discovered patterns in the arbitrariness of language, convenient ways to capture and communicate how most people
Yes, that's a the descriptive rules. They are useful for people who are interested in understanding how the language works or for people who just want to be more effective at communicating.
But then there are also "prescriptive rules", which are rules that don't necessarily reflect how the language works but are rather about how the language "ought to work". These are useful for people who want to create a distinction between an in-group and out-group, or generally just want to preserve how things used to be in the golden days of when they were young (or so they think).
It is harder to sound important, intellectual and well educated in English, since it is easier to sound important, intellectual and well educated.
In many languages there are some obscure grammar that you need to get right to sound smart. Like a filter for people with university studies. A in group out group thing. Secret club handshake.
My point is that English teachers try their best to emulate that, but they don't have much to work with, so it comes down to trivia.
We learn these rules in school, although the degree to which students care varies.
But, I was deprogrammed of my prejudice in University linguistics courses (highly recommend). What I learned is that speech is primary and it comes in many varieties (aka dialects) with different rules, and because textual communication has become the norm, we increasingly see these written.
It's a mistake to assume that a construction is ungrammatical just because it doesn't follow the rules of prestige English. Of course other varieties have subtly different rules. Many don't ever use "whom", for example, and it would be eyebrow-raising if you did. You can think of it as register or code switching, if it helps.
Similarly, orthography is just orthography, secondary to speech. It's a mistake to think that because someone wrote "should of," that they must not know the difference between "of" and "have". (In fact, that this orthographical error is virtually always made by a native speaker is some kind of signal.) Substandard for professional writing perhaps but that's all it is.
Schools, with few exceptions, try to get everyone speaking and writing in prestige English. We generally don't appreciate variety and fail to see the parallels with, say, snuffing out foreign languages.
I've since made the observation that it's curious that loving English almost always takes the form of being pedantic about prestige conventions and not instead enjoying the different flavors and their histories.
I wonder at which point of the evolution of the English language the spelling will diverge enough from the pronunciation for it to make sense to just switch to an ideographic writing system
I noticed there has been (relatively recently) a overcorrection of "John and me" to "John and I", independently of whether the "I" is nominative or accusative.
- Who saw it?
- John and I! (correct)
- With whom did Mary go?
- With John and I! (what? why?)
If the speaker doesn't really understand deeply what is the reason why you'd use "I" or "me", then all the rules around that sound arbitrary and they will make an effort to "clean up" their speech in order to not be labeled ignorant, but they will make another mistake that only truly annoying nitpickers like me will complain about, and that won't make any difference :-)
> - With whom did Mary go? - With John and I! (what? why?)
Or, equally painfully, "With John and myself!" (What? The speaker was also the subject of the sentence?)
THB I'm pulled between two incompatible positions:
(1) Nobody has a right to define "proper" English language. The language's grammar is literally however a plurality of people use it.
vs.
(2) There is a "proper" English; it's what we were taught in elementary school in the 1970's. Failing to adhere to those grammar rules (e.g., when to use "myself" or "whom") is objectively incorrect.
This article [0] seems to capture my thoughts nicely.
I realized that I owe a debt to my mother for consistently correcting me as a child on I/me, they/them and other subtle rules. I don't have to think about the rule, the incorrect word just sounds 'wrong'.
The downside is that I notice it easily in speeches or other talks given by otherwise intelligent individuals. If frequently repeated, it can be jarring, similar to an excess of 'um' or 'like'.
In what way is English grammar more “devolved” than Italian? It has, for example, simpler verb morphology (conjugations etc.) but more complex syntax and word order.
A similar one that I found amusing is 3 crows eyeing a donut on the ground, deciding whether they should eat it, and the caption was "A tempted murder".
I might be missing the point you're making, but isn't a baby cow called a calf, and a male cow called a bull? Unless castrated, in which case the bull is instead known as a steer.
> No-one looks outside their office window and says "what's that murder up to?"
To be fair, if I were to see a group of crows outside my office, that is exactly the kind of thing I might say to my apathy of coworkers for amusement.
It's a fun concept but it goes wrong when people think these are the only correct terms to use. Enforcing someone's whimsical fun as a language norm is a misunderstanding.
only a select few of them are actually ever used in my experience. Gaggle of geese, for example. And by reference, calling something else a gaggle would evoke the chaotic waddling and noisiness of geese, for example referring to a gaggle of schoolchildren
Even speakers of Sinitic languages, where usage of measure words is grammatically required, are often not aware of all the "correct" ones, and commonly use more generic ones. Ain't nobody got time for that :)
If you like this type of stuff or history of words try the Rob Words YouTube channel he has a lot of this stuff often presented in a lighthearted funny way.
"Just like suicide" by Soundgarden for me, but only after I was able to read the story about the crow flying into Chris' window, probably about a decade after I first heard the song.
An honestly, as with all such stories, who knows if it's real? Maybe the song is about something else. Still a great song!
Chinese depends on a similar language feature. You might have "two 隻 dogs" but "three 本 books" because books and dogs have different measure words. I believe this is more important in Chinese than English because Chinese overloads relatively few sounds to represent its vocabulary, so the extra word paired with a noun helps disambiguate it from its many homophones.
> “a parliament of owls” draws on ancient Greek mythology, in which an owl accompanies Athena — the goddess of wisdom and reason, representing freedom and democracy across the Western world.
This is rich, given that Athenians never had a proper Parliament. The Ecclesia was not a representative body. Just goes to show how silly this whole concept really is.
A parliament of owls seems a confusion with Chaucers's Parlement of Foules (which derives from Persian poetry). Anyway as the article states it's a stare of owls.
e.g. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=flock+of+geese...
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=flock+of+crows...