"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse w#$%&. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
Wow, this was hard. And hilarious. Why does English need different words for all animal groups? And did anyone else try human for parliament, nuns for convent and bandicoot for crash?
English doesn't need any of these terms, that's why 90% of them have fallen out of use completely. I suspect most of them were always rather esoteric and used by specific groups of people. Neither Merriam Webster nor the OED list most of these definitions.
The people who invented English must have been having a slow day when they got to animal groups. "Herd" would work perfectly fine for all of these. Not that I'm complaining. It's just weird that for this very particular purpose, we need a different noun for every animal. I can't think of any other subject in which English does that.
Most animal group names are made up in recent times. People repeat them as if they are somehow official. Maybe I should make one up and put it on this quiz!
Well, people... even if you disregard occupation related things. You got a gang, clique, posse, band (of brothers), gathering. Well the list is rather endless, (most are connected to a certain activity though, like a group of people walking, caravan, colonne)
I imagine that these odd group lists were created by the same rich, bored people who decided that every flower and gem stone had symbolic meaning. So if you sent your friend peonies and a turquoise ring, that had a different secret meaning than if you had sent daisies and pearls. Apparently even the position of a stamp on an envelope had meaning. There was also this whole complex system of what type of visitation card you left depending on your social status as well as a plethora of dining utensils and drinking glasses.
Terms of venery have been around since the Middle Ages, when they were used mostly by hunters. By the 1500s, however, it had been turned into a sort of game to make up appropriate new ones.
Then they werent surrounded by a whole bunch of useless pointless things like nowadays. So yea plenty of "room" to make new things up.
The bliss of having nothing else to than look at a flower and thinking about it s deeper meaning.Or spend your free time comparing shapes of leaves We dont see the simply things in life anymore, because the entire world is screaming at us in colours and flashing and screens etc. (And not to mention thepeople themselves..)
Other cat ones: A group of (domestic) cats is called a clowder, but that usually refers to a feral colony. If you want a collective name for all the pet cats in your household, that's called a pounce!
lol i totally didnt get what this was about i thought this was about groups of species of animals names so i thought birds would be avia or dinosaur or animalia or vertebra or something like that lol so i was really confused untill i saw the answers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_terms_of_venery,_by_animal
--James D. Nicoll
The bliss of having nothing else to than look at a flower and thinking about it s deeper meaning.Or spend your free time comparing shapes of leaves We dont see the simply things in life anymore, because the entire world is screaming at us in colours and flashing and screens etc. (And not to mention thepeople themselves..)