Why is it a "murder" of crows?
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 29 เม.ย. 2024
- From a 'business (or 'busyness') of ferrets' to a 'drunkship of cobblers': join Jess and Rob to collectively explore the weird world of collective nouns.
Hear all about the bizarre book that coined scores of these terms, which are also known "nouns of assembly" or "terms of venery". Plus, we take a deep dive into the histories of words like "flock" and "swarm".
THE BOOK OF ST ALBANS: www.google.co.uk/books/editio...
👂LISTEN: podfollow.com/words-unravelle...
or search for "Words Unravelled" wherever you get your podcasts.
==LINKS==
Rob's TH-cam channel: / robwords
Jess' Useless Etymology blog: uselessetymology.com/
Rob on X: x.com/robwordsyt
Jess on TikTok: tiktok.com/@jesszafarris
#etymology #wordfacts #English
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As a retail employee, my favorite is a Privilege of Karens
Hey! I'm a Karen, and proud! (and obviously a white woman over 40)
Just shut me up! The harder you try, the louder I get.
I thought it’s a complaint of Karen’s?
A Vexation of Karens.
I love all these suggestions for collective Karen nouns 😂😂
Westerners need to look up the ethnic Karen people, who were staunch allies both The U.S. and UK, and are a tremendously noble, hardworking, and dedicated people, and stop using their national name for such a derogatory term. There are many Karen communities in The United States and The UK, many of which were refugees, and they have said they wish people would stop using their name to denote the very opposite of the kind of people they are.
After the financial crisis of 2008, I thought that maybe we should call a group of financial executives "a wunch of bankers."
That's in Wiktionary. They are hoist by their own contrepétard.
My teenager has commented on "attempted murders" in our neighborhood anywhere that two crows occupy a lawn.
Many years ago I offered a photo to a local competition, which I titled "A Clique of Photographers" I won no prize and most of the comments I received were accompanied by groans.
@nigelskelton45 - were most of those comments from groan-ups ?
Add one very appreciative groan from this reader! Very clever!
Only works if you mispronounce clique.
My lovely wife has a sweatshirt with an illustration of TWO crows, along with the words, “Attempted Murder”. Most people who see it wonder out loud what that means.
My absolute favourite is from Inspector Morse: a body of pathologists
Love the Morse series & this was brilliant !!
Loved Morse. Found all 13 novels together at the thrift store I work in and bought the lot despite already having copies of several...the TV series was brilliant as well (as were its spinoffs Inspector Lewis and Endeavour)...
I drove around a group of grandmothers a while back, and a friend came up with the perfect collective name - "An anxiety of grannies."
This may not hit the right audience but there's a list of collective nouns for Minecraft mobs. Including a Grief of Creepers, Cloud of Ghasts, Murmur of Villagers, etc.
Going to guess at a string of spiders, eggcecution of dragons, rose of Withers
"An underfunding of professors" is worth mentioning.
How about the 'underfunding of students'?
More like a debt of students
@@pjl22222 gaggle of students...
@@pjl22222A "debt of students" would be specific to the US.
That is the fault of a defaecation of politicians.
As a parent of three teenagers, we came up with the collective noun "a whinge of teenagers".
I work with data analysts and refer to them as " a matrix of analysts" - they like that!
Rob’s blushes are amusing, like a “No sex, please, we are British” statement. 😊
I used to work with three ladies called Patricia who were known collectively as a 'Cow of Pats'
The use of rhyming couplets makes it easier to remember long lists, which is why classical epics are poetry.
Yes, and it should also be remembered that the book was written at a time when printing was still an extreme novelty. Rhyming was a tool for memorising texts before books became available to anyone not exceedingly rich. The oral traditions went back for millennia while printing was still what? A few years old? A decade? They probably didn't in their hearts believe that this "printing" thing would ever amount to more than an amusing oddity. Of course they stuck to the formats they were familiar with.
The best thing about 'collective nouns' has to be the linguistic tolerance for creativity.
A friend of mine coined "a calliope of clowns" back in the 1980s.
Shrimp eat algae that contains carotenoid pigments, which make them pink. Flamingos eat that same algae AND the shrimp as well, which causes them to be pink also.
A block of writers. Left me rolling .
A pretension of writers, a chapter of writers, a verse of writers, a quill of writers, a plagiarism of writers ...
You forgot a modern one: "An annoyance of cell phones."
As someone that gains joy from these discussions, I'd like to submit " a verbosity of word nerds"
The joke is that if you ask 100 Architects a question you will get at least 101 answers. So, a Contrary of Architects.
The word shoddy (cloth assembled from scraps) is related to "made out of whole cloth" which means a lie. Tailors always claimed their suits were made from "whole cloth", which meant the entire suit was made from the same bolt of fabric, so it would shrink and fade consistently as it aged. No one believed a tailor would simply let the scraps pile up. After a few washings, it was obvious when a suit was made from shoddy material. It must have been such a common experience, "made out of whole cloth" survived the industrialization of the clothing business.
My favorite example is the set of terms for a group of vultures. Circling overhead they are a "kettle". Roosted together in trees, they are a "committee", and while feeding on a carcass, they are a "wake" of vultures.
I've heard "parliament" used as a collective noun for owls.
I’ve been known to refer to my Insufficiency of Clamps, because you always need more clamps!
As an engineer a co-worker once asked where all the logistics people where, and what the collective noun should be for them. I responded by coining the paradoxical collective noun "a shortage of logistics personnel" Look! I am a retired engineer geeky comes as standard.
For a more modern take on collective nouns there’s always James Lipton‘s book, An Exultation of Larks. He has such groupings as a wince of dentists, and a lot of realtors.
Makes total sense to me that the book had been written in rhyme as literacy would've been low at the time. So, when read aloud, the listeners' would be entertained while also helping them commit the information to memory. Just a thought :)
Rhyme makes it easier to remember. Book ownership itself would be rare.
Yes, recipes were songs that included timing by rhyming :) long chorus=long wait between next step.
Yes, that was my guess as well.
Scarborough Faire is partly a chicken soup recipe
🏴 Trucker here,
A Despatchment of Drivers 🚛
22:11 That German word as a possible origin of the English "shark" would be "Schurke", a worthless rogue, a scoundrel.
Probably both descended from a common ancestor
That must be the same as the swedish word "skurk".
Skurk in Afrikaans is a bad person/robber.
Haai is Afrikaaans for the fish called shark
@@jacohauptfleisch935Very close to German.
There it's "Schurke" and "Hai".
It's unclear where "Schurke" stems from. It might be related to the word "Schüren" (to stoke).
In old German the guy who stoked the fire was called "fiurscurgo" and maybe the often black and dirty appearance was associated with a bad person, a wrong doer.
The military seems a source of numerous collective nouns, formal and not so formal, but 'gaggle' seems to have been used for an informal aggregation of attack aircraft during WWII. As for my own areas of entomological (not etymological) expertise, perhaps 'an itching of mites', 'a squirming of worms', 'a creeping of caterpillars', 'an inflammation of moths', 'a terror of ticks' and 'a festering of flies'. Thanks for another delightful and informative podcast!
An irrelevance of pundits; a slush of categories; an atrocity of Trumps; a tsunami of slam-dancers; a giggle of pillow-fighters; a profundity of senators.
I believe that geese are called a skein when flying, but a gaggle when on the ground.
I have a few personal ones for different engineers:
a bolt of mechanical engineers
a shock of electrical ...
a core of computer ...
a listing of software ...
a conurbation of civil ...
an uncertainty of quantum ...
a flottila of naval ...
and a flight of aeronautical engineers
-+As an Aussie a Wombat is a promiscuous male as a 'wombat eats roots, shoots and leaves', with double entendre throughout. Also, a W.O.M.B.A.T. is an acronym for Waste of Money, Brains And Time, can be used for a hobby, a project that never ends, or coddiwobble, or a promiscuous person (without intent to marry or to settle down)
Now I've learned something. When I've visited Australia I've heard someone refer to another as a Wombat. I thought they meant soft and cuddly ( even knowing that a wombat isn't of a particularly cuddly nature)! 😂
When I was a child, my father referred to the family of raccoons living near my grandfather's farmhouse as "A Criminality of Raccoons", as they all had "masks" he explained. Years later, I discovered a list of collective phrases where " A Gaze of Raccoons". Never again have I heard of the former used, but a few times the latter.
and not a Beagle (Boys) of Raccoons - as per the old Scrooge McDuck comics! 😄
One aside worth mentioning is how the previously unheard-of term "Flange of Baboons" crept into usage after it was invented in a UK sketch show in the 1980s.
Best new podcast ever. Love this. I use a chemical called ferric chloride to etch metal. In the water purification business, ferric chloride is used as a “flocculator.” It gathers impurities into larger pieces (“flocks?”) so that they an be caught in filters. I just love when two pieces of the knowledge puzzle click together.
"a cardigan of social workers" 😅😅
Just adding my profession to your discussion at the end - a "drudge" of office workers, perhaps? Thanks for the video, though, these are getting to be a real highlight for me :)
A spark of electricians, a flush of plumbers, an offcut of carpenters, either a brush or a run of painters, a boil of cooks, a tree of arborists, a number of engineers, and a confusion of management.
A tut of mother-in-laws.
mothers in law...
@@RodneyGravesaw crap, beat me to it...
@@stevetournay6103 Mothers in Law, Attorney's General, Courts Martial.
Surely 2 crows would be an attempted murder, and a single crow would be a suicide? Jus' sayin'...
😂
A journey of giraffes
And when you see them walking on the African plains, the name really fits
A punctiliousness of pedants.
A *_very_* English-language phenomenon. In German, there exist really only very generic collective nouns, such as Herde (herd) which can apply to lots of different animals. To my knowledge, we have zero specific ones (such as a pride which is always lions).
Yes, it's just an English phenomenon and wasn't the case for most of English history either.
We could all make these up!
A f***load of frogs
A gruel of grashoppers
A panel of pachycephalosauruses
A grumble of greyhounds
A tingle of Tarantulas
Language is unbreakable!
Presumably the “subtlety of Serjeants” was a reference to the Serjeants-at-law, an order of barristers established as far back as the 14th Century. The second most senior judge at the Central Criminal Court in London (aka “the Old Bailey”) is still titled the Common Serjeant of London.
I play the ukulele in my spare time. Someone wanted the technical term for a ukulele player, so the "Ukulalien" was created. As for plurals, with a few suggestions, a "Cacophony of ukulaliens".
Jess says she's surprised that people of middle England would encounter exotic animals such as flamingoes, but courtiers and aristocrats who wanted to impress their peers would often make gifts of animals, the more obscure the better.
The Tower of London for example had its own elephant in residence during the reign of Henry III. Unfortunately the animal keepers of the time assumed that such a big beast would need a strong diet, so they fed him meat and gallons of wine instead of just grass and water, so he was only about 12 when he died on Valentine's Day 1257.
And interestingly, the first person in Britain to be killed by a tiger was a barmaid at a Wiltshire pub called The White LIon. Hannah Twynnoy had a habit of teasing the tiger, and she was warned not to, but nevertheless, she persisted. However, that didn't happen until 1703, so not in the era we're talking about, but a fascinating nugget all the same.
Anne McCaffrey has a good one for the diminutive ancestral dragons in her Pern series: a fair of firelizards.
Jess is kind of right about the flamingos being tired. Flamingos are able to sleep on one half of their body, while staying awake on the other side. And they simply flip flop between each side that is the reason why they always have one leg curled up.
If a single crow is an attempted murder then a group of 19 crows should be called a pandemic 😜
A Stagger of Drunks.
Bunch of Bradys 🤣
Loved this episode it is such a fascinating topic.
did you know, that those of us with a chronic illness that is rare, such as my condition ehlers danlos syndrome (a connective tissue disorder) are known as medical zebras. This is because, when drs are taught medicine, they're taught if you hear hoof beats, think horses (not zebras!) In other words, when someone presents with symptoms, then always go for a diagnosis of a common condition, don't look for rare or odd conditions, because few peoole have them! Well we have rare conditions & are thus proof that zebras (people with rare conditions) do in fact exist, and we're referred to as a dazzle too.
As a Swede, I wasn't even aware that this kind of collective nouns existed! To me a collectiive noun is when you use a singular to denote an undetermined amount of something, like "fruit" instead of "fruits".
I think that's called a "mass noun" in English, as opposed to a "count noun" for things that come in discrete quantities.
An incompetence of programmers, a silliness of software engineers
My first exposure to these collective nouns was in the book by James Lipton (yes, he of "Inside the Actor's Studio" series), "An Exultation of Larks," his 1993 update of his earlier book from 1968.
In Pirates of Penzance, Frederick refers to the Major General's daughters upon first sighting them as, "A bevy of beautiful maidens."
Apart from an alcoholic drink, the only time I have ever heard "bevvy" used is to refer to a group of girls at a beauty pageant or some such.
Johnny Carson........."a shaft of lawyers"
A lie of lawyers?
In my experience, which goes back quite a while originally in Western Canada, it is beauties that come in bevies.
A gaggle of geese when in flight, a skien of geese when on the water.
Also, a quiver of arrows comes from that period, too. The generec teem used to be simply "scabbard" but then someone got clever about the sound an arrow makes after hitting a target.
Lastly, my all time favorite is a superfluity of supervisors.
A Procrastination of Writers
Regarding sharks being 'water lawyers', here in Australia they are sometimes referred to as 'the man in the grey suit', which I think is an interesting comparison.
I had things to do so thought I'd watch the first five minutes with my coffee and watch the rest later. But I couldn't pull myself away from this. Very interesting! Thanks.
A drawing of architects? (Either of buildings or software/databases/other tech).
A sum of accountants?
An aftermath of investigators? ...Just to coin a few.
I was going to suggest a credit of accountants.
A "walk" of snails might refer to the snail's foot.
Because of the beauty of the Australian Magpies song they are often collectively known as a Chorus of Magpies.
Hawking!! I wonder when/how hawking became a word for selling something loudly or aggressively?
I remember how, as a child, I was baffled by a sign on the wall of the building where I lived: "No hawkers, no circulars"
Hawks are pretty aggressive! Peddler. hawker. monger, all the same occupation. And if the lady who wrote St. Albans really wanted to be posh, she should have called it "Falconry".
My friends and I use a "Chrisis of Chris's" since there are an inconvenient number of our friends and family with that name.
My wife’s maiden name is Regn, pronounced like the bird, wren. Whenever there was a family gathering, I would refer to it as a “disfunction of Regn’s” owing to the family dynamics.
How about penguins? I always picture them huddled together, surviving the cold winds. A rub of penguins? A shrug? How about a scrum of penguins? Shout out to Rob's home country
A jostle? (Since at least in some places, that's what they do on the edge of their ice sheet, instead of taking their plunge and discovering there's a leopard seal waiting down there. They jostle and jostle till someone falls in, and then they all go after he's been taken by the predator they were worried about.)
I like "Scrum". That seems apropos.
I have subscribed to "Rob words" for some time now, and always look forward to his videos. Now I came across "Words unraveled", and I'm absolutely delighted to meet the lovely and intelligent Jess. You two make a great combination. I immediately subscribed. The discussion about the origins of the word shark was my favorite part of the video - like Rob, I thought the fish came first.
A "flange of gorillas". Started off as part of sketch from "Not the Nine O'Clock News", and ended up appearing in published papers. That, I found to be particularly amusing, both the sketch, and the appropriation.
I was hoping this would be mentioned...
I would like to propose a pick of locksmiths! 🗝️
I'm loving this podcast. Jess needs a microphone upgrade though. Keep up the great work! BTW, what's the collective noun for collective nouns? ;-)
I always heard Flamingos stand on one leg because if they picked up the other leg they would fall down.
😂
Just in case you don't know this, the Portuguese word for a snake (any snake) is _cobra_ . And then in India they were exposed to an unusual "cobra" called the _cobra do capella_ - which became the English name for that kind of cobra. (And then customary laziness reduced it to just "cobra".)
Not the adder kind of cobra. Not the Vine Snake type of cobra. Not the viper kind of cobra. Just the one with a capella.
We have an incredible Islamic tradition of writing many of our scholarly treatises in rhyme, because it was expected that students would memorise them. How can you memorise a scholarly treatise if it's written in stuffy prose? Take ibn Malik's "Alfiyyah" (literally the word for "thousand" (Alf) rendered into the abstract noun format) which is 13th century work of a thousand lines of poetry designed to teach Arabic grammar! Maybe that's what sister Juliana Berners was going for.
And don't forget "A Parliament of Owls"😂😊
A fitting one for the channel is an argumentation of historians.
Art galleries have their stable of artists...
I recall that a group of coin collectors can be referred to as a 'harmlessness of numismatists' - also applies to philatelists!
As a palaeontologist, I could describe many groups of academics as a bumble, or maybe a bloviation. Context-sensitive usage.
I want to say _a nightmare of bugs_ - meaning the software kind.
How about a "Train of Engineers"?
My favourite is actually a fantasy one coined by the author Christopher Paolini in one of his books which is A Thunder of Dragons, which refers to the sound that would be made by so many large, flapping wings.
My understanding is that collective nouns are transient providing a cheerful and pictorial collective description to fit a narrative and so often they remain as the preferred collective noun to describe the object in a fun way. I described the style of a very talented DJ playing and mixing music to a busy dance floor as a "cauldron of counterpoints".
I'm really enjoying these podcasts so far. Looking forward to the next.
That the word shark used for shady people in the old days reminds me as a Dutchy of the Dutch word schurk...
One I heard in another video: a whimsy of collective nouns.
I've been told it's a type of algae flamingos eat and that's how the nutrients in it effect them.
Not to forget the small crustaceans that live in the algae-laden lakes that flamingos reside in.
On "Big City Greens" they have an episode where a character befriends a flock of crows. Pretty sure the animation team just wanted an excuse to say murder in a kids show.
lol, I describe my dog as “a drawing of a lion done by a medieval monk who has only had one described to him”. Perfectly captures her look!
Around @2:30 , great observation, Rob! By the 15th century, Europeans had made the trip all the way to the Americas. In ancient times, there was commercial traffic that began in Rome and ended in China and India. Rome itself sent ships to India. And even before Rome was founded, traders took their boats even up the Atlantic coast to trade in Ireland and Wales. The Mediterranean peoples may not all have had all the shared knowledge of the world, but it was a collection and distribution point for surprisingly far-reaching observations. Lions are written about in the Bible (not only lions). And Egypt sits on the Mediterranean but extends rather deeply into Africa. There's a Biblical story about a man from the Kingdom of Sheba (now Ethiopia), and Christianity reached that area in the first centuries. In the 15th century, many in England read the Bible too, and it would have sparked interest in such far-flung matters. Besides, there was closer contact during the Crusades, when a considerable number of knights went to parts of the Holy Land. We can't discount the volume and depth of lore that passed back to England, and may have gone into books such as the Book of St Albans.
I might also leave you with the thought that the medieval mixture of animal and human traits (and depictions) was not due to anthropomorphizing, but rather due to observation of the traits of the animals, and recognizing aspects of those traits in humans (for good or otherwise), and then transferring the sheer bestiality of some human behaviors (which had descended to the levels of the beasts). Those are certainly terms used in discussions of morality in those times. It wasn't condemnation of animals, who were acting out of their own nature, but of humans, who were acting below their nature.
So delightful! I love the way your eyes sparkle as you explore this fascinating and fun subject. I own James Lipton’s marvelous book, An Exhalation of Larks. I’ve heard some marvelous new ones, like a wince of dentist, a pound of carpenters, a smear of gynecologists.
A fanfare of elephants!
A classic example is when the comedy series "Not the nine o'clock news" introduced the term " a flange of baboons" in the "Gerald the gorilla" skit.
It has since been used in at least one scientific paper.
A murmuration of starlings isn't a collective noun so much as a collective behaviour. see if you can see a film of one. it isn't just the group; it's the whole formation flying thing too.
A stunningly beautiful thing to see.....
I live in Arizona. My dad uses misters to cool the yard. In the mist the sparrows cluster up to mate. I've taken to calling the gathering an orgy of sparrows.
A click of photographers.