I was at a trivia quiz the other night and one of the questions was what was the collective noun for a group of toads. The answer was a Knot of Toads. How strange I thought it did not make any sense to me unless someone once upon a time looked at a bunch of toads together and thought they looked like a rope with a knot in it.
This got me thinking about other strange collective nouns and how on earth they came into being. A Bike of bees: not too strange as bike is an old English word which means colony, nest or swarm. A Rhumba of rattlesnakes, apparently their slow weaving followed by fast strikes resembles the slow quick pattern of the dance. A Crash of rhinoceroses and a Prickle of porcupines are self explanatory but why are a group of ravens called an Unkindness and a group of crows called a Murder?
I was going to continue this by inventing some witty collective nouns for groups of people in certain professions but once I did some research I discovered that the accepted terms are far wittier than I could have come up with. You can have an Entrance of actresses, a Pratfall of clowns and a Rash of dermatologists. A Pound of English and a Clan of Scots are not very funny but what about a Pint of Irish that’s somehow quite appropriate but not as much as the term for gynecologists which is a Smear. My two favourites are a Lie of politicians and an Unhappiness of husbands.
The English language is a strange creature if we transport something by car it’s called a shipment but if we send it by ship it’s called a cargo, we pack suits into a garment bag but garments into a suitcase, your nose runs and your feet smell.
These examples pale into significance when you start to hear the names of grammatical structures I can just get my head around the fact that all, many and numerous are called quantifiers and that mine, yours and hers are called possessives but I have never heard of determiners which are the and a or demonstratives which are this and that, and what on earth is a declension?
I am a native English speaker, or as much as a Scot can be, and I was taught English grammar at school I even got and O’ level and an A’ level in it and I would have been happy to live my life out in complete ignorance of the official names of the structures I use in my everyday speech and writing but I had to come and live abroad where I encounter on a daily basis people for whom English is not their native language and who were taught it as a second language so they were taught all these structures and what they were called before actually learning what the words mean. I am often told, by one or other of these people, that my preposition is stranded or my infinitive is split and I think they have reverted to their native language because I don’t understand a word of it. I do understand, however, when my editor tells me that my sentences are too long … but that’s just a style thing, or laziness … take your pick.
Lastly, to go back to collective nouns, here’s one for all the scribblers out there, a group of writers is called a Worship. The editor-in-chief likes that.
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