A German friend and I were discussing collective nouns. You know the kind of thing: A swarm of bees. A bunch of flowers. A deck of cards. I asked him if there were such things in his language. He said there were, but very few. How to describe a lot of cows, sheep, goats or horses? Well, the word in German is herde. But just the one word, common to all. Why, he wondered, would it need to be any different from one type of animal to another?
Good question. Why indeed?
Several collective nouns are applied to more than one type of creature: Both whales and pelicans gather in pods. Sheep and birds in flocks. The same applies to troops, gaggles, colonies or bevies. However, when these terms become exclusive, things really start to get odd. Only starlings for example gather in a murmuration. Only badgers form a cete. And what about the choice of word to describe these gatherings? Surprisingly often the terms selected seem downright judgemental. A few are celebratory—an exultation of larks, a pride of lions. More frequently they are pejorative: a plague of locusts, an unkindness of ravens, a mischief of rats or a murder of magpies.
Some echo with the weary bitterness of hard life experience: a tedium of golfers, a mutter of mothers in law, an ingratitude of children. Others are delightfully mischievous. I love a guess of diagnosticians or a smear of gynaecologists. A few offer revealing alternatives. Grandparents, interestingly can either be referred to en masse as a wisdom or a nag. One or two are downright obsequious—an erudition of editors, for example. No prizes for guessing the occupation of the creator of that one.
Why does any of this matter?
Because sadly it is still true that you may get away with mistakenly describing a flock of sheep as a herd, but people will look at you askance if you referred to them as a pack, a pod or a troop. Politely condescending smiles and slightly raised eyebrows would greet your announcement that you’ve just seen a flock of cows.
Now my German friend, generous to a fault, attributes this plethora of collective nouns (I think that might just be another one) to the wonderful richness of the English language. But I am not so sure. This seems to me more like the use of Latin in Church or Courts in previous times. It is there to separate those who know the language from those who don’t and to enhance the power of the former at the expense of the latter.
I suspect there are few languages better than English for subtly separating the insiders from the outsiders.
Twitter: @dawoodmccallum
Neil McCallum *Writes as Dawood Ali McCallum
Author of five novels, Mrs A’s Indian Gentlemen* being the latest