Sorry, but it is -- or at least, can be. Experts on crows do not get to decide what we call groups of crows. Not even experts on language do -- English lacks a governing council, so it's a murder of crows if most people agree that it's a murder of crows. This point is conceded at the end for "pack of wolves" and "pod of dolphins", which have entered common usage. Maybe the others will or won't, but it won't be up to zebra experts to decide if it's a dazzle of zebras, or simply a herd.
Exactly: experts do not decide what a group of crows is called, regular people do. And I have never in my life heard anyone seriously refer to a murder of crows, except in the context "Hey did you know this cool piece of trivia? A group of crows is called a murder!" Furthermore if you actually used "murder of crows" in a real context people would likely be confused. Therefore, I conclude "murder of crows" is not really part of the English language.
Another way of thinking about it...imagine you are writing a textbook about the English language for people learning it as a second language. You want to instruct them about how to use English in the real world. Would you tell them to refer to a group of crows as a "murder"?
I used the term in a conversation last week. The birds in question were actually Tarsier Ravens, but the term murder of Crows was most appropriate, and understood completely by the person I was talking with.
This might be generational, I'm well read and the other party was of an older generation.
We all live in valleys and it's hard to see over yonder hills, to other worlds and peoples ..
> The birds in question were actually Tarsier Ravens, but the term murder of Crows was most appropriate, and understood completely by the person I was talking with.
So you used a completely "wrong" collective noun (a group of ravens is supposedly a "parliament") and were understood just as well as if you'd used the "correct" one? Sounds like you've proven the article's point.
I'm also perplexed by the parent's reference to a "parliament" of ravens. Not only have I personally ever only seen it in context of owls, the article actually uses "a parliament of owls" as an example itself.
I'm sure that in certain contexts you might even throw in a totally bogus, invented term and a human would be perfectly able to match this with the assumption that you're referring to "a group" just from context. Tell someone you saw a "rowlow of ravens all flying in unison" and they'll just assume you used a neologism, perhaps with some doubt or uncertainly in the back of the mind.
The weird thing about the "murder of crows" or a "parliament of rooks" is the use of such common words, especially slightly shocking ones like "murder". This raises more eyebrows and feels more like a joke for the unaware.
A "wisdom of wombats", a "lamentation of swans"... An "ambush of tigers" would certainly be interpreted as the act of ambushing.
Look at the list here [0] and you'll find it very random.
> I'm sure that in certain contexts you might even throw in a totally bogus, invented term and a human would be perfectly able to match this with the assumption that you're referring to "a group"
I'd go as far to venture that in all contexts you could throw in some made up term. It will be understood by the other person, however they may think that you're a bit strange for referring to "an orgy of ants" for instance.
That's the funny thing about language; it's highly contextual, and humans are great at filling in the gaps based on context if there is some part of a communication that is not understood, miscommunicated or not even heard.
What's a tarsier raven? I can't find anything describing that common name; I get back results about tarsiers and results about ravens, but nothing that combines the two. I wouldn't necessarily expect it to be in any of my bird books, which mostly only cover North America, but it's a surprise for Google to likewise come up empty.
> Furthermore if you actually used "murder of crows" in a real context people would likely be confused.
You mix with different people than I. 90% of my friends would understand that seamlessly - and those that didn't would recognize it as a term of venery from context.
But it's defined specifically in the second paragraph of the original article, so it makes sense to use the same terminology in discussion comments, right?
the people who keep this issue alive are people who take a delight in it, it being something that people like me think is really stupid. When I hear murder of crows or the term "terms of venery", I roll my eyes and throw up a little in my mouth.
It's not a big issue to me, but my impulse upon hearing about the topic is simply the opposite of the people who keep it alive. It's more twee than is an American, such as myself, using the term twee.
I would argue that the people (such as myself) who enjoy word-trivia like this are not "keeping the issue alive", because they don't believe there's an issue. If you don't want to use those words, then you are free to (not) do so. I enjoy knowing them, and I'll keep using them on the _extremely_ rare occasion that they're relevant.
It's the people who tell the others that they are wrong (whichever side of the debate they're on) who make it an issue.
i am a little saddened by your downvotes after deciding to actually check the definition of 'venery', without making more assumptions on top of your assumptions, to find that the first definition is in fact 'sexual indulgence'. the second definition being 'hunting' thereby making your mistaken definition a very reasonable mistake.
Agreed! But I assert that people would still recognize "a murder of crows" as such, even if they don't have a name for it - just like I would expect someone to be able to recognize an equilateral triangle as such, even if they don't know the name for it.
Actually, English is not my native language, I started learning it in primary school in fifth grade (at around ten).
Unfortunately, teachers do teach that and there was a test for the various group names, like a school of fish, a pod of whales, a parliament of owls, etc. And yes, the murder of crows was included. That was in secondary school, though, so admittedly at a higher level of education but it is taught and tested against.
There are some commonly used which you should know. A school of fish, for example. A flock can be used for both birds and sheep, and it is very frequently used. A pod exists but is less common.
These rarer ones can frequently be replaced with a commonly used one, and often are. I think most people would talk about a 'flock of crows'.
It may be less common, but it's where Kubernetes got its term 'pod.' Docker's mascot is a whale, Kubernetes manages groups of related Docker containers … pod!
Maybe it's regional? I've known, used and heard 'murder of crows' for as long as I can remember. Admittedly it's not every day that I have conversations about crows, but the term has never seemed novel to me and I've never had somebody explain it to me as trivia.
Actually, just last night I said to my wife, (jokingly) "Oh look, a murder of pigeons!", and she was not confused. English is pretty flexible, and it's changing everyday.
I'm not sure I'd refer to crows, a murder of or a flock of, in a beginner's textbook on the English language. I don't think crows are commonplace enough in every day conversation to justify their inclusion.
If I was needing to refer to a group of crows in this textbook then I'd refer to them by their proper collective noun, a murder of, because that would be correct.
I disagree. What about “Experts do not decide what is and isn’t a programming language, regular people do, so if they say HTML is one, it is”?
I think it is more that there are two terminologies in different fields, just as, in botany, tomatoes and cucumbers are berries, and strawberries aren’t.
Similarly, I've been saying for years that Pluto is still a "planet" if enough people want it to be. The cultural concept and etymological ancestry predates telescopes by thousands of years.
Edit: To explain my position better, modern Science has been using an old word - which belongs to everyone - for its own purposes, which is of course fine! However, members of the general public get to do that, too. Outside Science classrooms, I've seen a lot of annoying linguistic prescriptivism explaining that a committee of scientists got into a room and made a judgement call that the person being addressed is now wrong and must change their behavior because the committee said so, which is a great, if small, example of why there is an ongoing wave of anti-intellectualism.
Indeed, Pluto is an interesting one for a number of reasons. One is that much of the commotion came from the fact that the word planet is very much a cultural concept, and a scientific body was attempting to redefine the word for everyone. No one would have cared if it was simply a scientific term - if Pluto was now classified as a spacial object type C instead of a spacial object type B.
Another is that the reason why the IAU decided to change the definition appears to have been for cultural reasons as well. Astronomers discovered other Kuiper belt objects. This included Eris, which was more massive than Pluto. They'd either have to tell people "There are more than 9 planets, and we don't know how many there are," or kick Pluto out and continue the myth of the simple solar system (with one fewer planet now). So they went with the more conservative option, by creating a new definition of planet that still isn't formally defined, and by explicitly saying dwarf planets aren't planets. Eris was discovered in 2005, the new IAU definition of planet was agreed upon in 2006.
It's worth noting that prior to this, the IAU didn't even define the word "planet," it was a popularly defined term. So there's an element of asserting control over something outside of their purview simply because they objected to the cultural connotations.
Here's an interesting article from the time that shows some of the thought that went into this[1].
Old definition of 'Planet' is still in play. Because Pluto doesn't meet the definition of 'Planet', it is now called a "Dwarf Planet".
Ultimately, it comes down to the scientific issue of Pluto, Charon, and Eris. Its hard to make Pluto a planet without calling Eris a planet. Pluto also interacts with Neptune and Charon in unfortunate ways unlike other "proper planets", like Earth, Mars, or Mercury.
The IAU definition is absurd given the current search for exoplanets, because we will be able to detect planemos orbiting other stars long before we have any hope of being able to tell whether they've cleared their orbits. It would be much more practical - that is, useful for actually communicating empirical information - to define a planet as a planemo, Luna, Ceres and Eris included.
> The IAU definition is absurd given the current search for exoplanets, because we will be able to detect planemos orbiting other stars long before we have any hope of being able to tell whether they've cleared their orbits.
The IAU definition of “planet” explicitly applies only to the solar system, and the only definition even attempted for exoplanets IIRC is to try to define a dividing line between them and brown dwarfs, effectively “exoplanets” are extrasolar planemos.
> It would be much more practical - that is, useful for actually communicating empirical information - to define a planet as a planemo, Luna, Ceres and Eris included.
I don't see how that follows, since having cleared an orbit is addition empirical information, and information that we are able to develop on solar system objects, if not extrasolar ones, in reasonable time. As is, e.g., whether or not an object is a natural satellite of something orbitting the sun or does so itself.
> effectively “exoplanets” are extrasolar planemos
Right, which I think proves my point - surely we'd like planet and exoplanet to mean equivalent things.
> I don't see how that follows, since having cleared an orbit is addition empirical information, and information that we are able to develop on solar system objects, if not extrasolar ones, in reasonable time.
Well, I'd argue that Pluto (and Ceres before it) shows that it may take us an unreasonably long time. And the current definition awkwardly mixes two things that are really separate concerns: the characteristics of the object itself and what it's orbiting.
> It would be much more practical - that is, useful for actually communicating empirical information - to define a planet as a planemo, Luna, Ceres and Eris included.
I remember actual excitement among the layperson upon the announcement of discovering a 10th planet.
Which is interesting since that would mean that "the nine planets" is a totally valid, understood concept, just like "the seven seas" - which is actually since a more interesting concept since that's a much more vague term since arguably the actual number of "seas" is anywhere between 1 (since basically all the worlds water is interconnected, bar a few endorheic basins) and "many", if you start counting large inland bodies like the great lakes that see substantial ship traffic.
Well, then actually on July 20th, 1969, the earth did become a planet, for at least some humans, and thus, by virtue of our capacity for taking the perspective of others, we may now all refer to it as such.
It’s such a shame to see children taught that there are nine (/eight) big things in the solar system worth caring about and that’s it.
It’s so much more exciting to know that the solar system is an enormous continuous spectrum of debris. The debris is named and catalogued, it’s that tangible.
I love seeing children go wide eyed at the mention of Ceres. It’s like the Azores of the planets — there’s another place/planet in the middle of nowhere that no one talks about?!
The final step in this is to recognize that, out of the full spectrum of Trojans to TNOs to moons to planets, the planets really are in a class of their own in terms of long term effect on other bodies in their orbit.
Pluto isn’t a planet. But that doesn’t mean we exclude it. It means we include Ceres and a whole lot more whenever we talk about our local system.
(Or at least the inner parts of our local system that we’ve found, so far.)
If everyone except the IAU decided to keep calling Pluto a planet, that's just a divergence between technical definitions and popular ones (the latter of which is not well defined). This happens all the time, and it's not particularly interesting.
On occasion I have argued that dolphins are fish, despite being air breathing mammals, using an argument quite similar to this. The use of the word 'fish' to describe animals that live in the water predates biologists deciding they'd redefine the term unilaterally for the rest of society. The novel Moby Dick explains in detail the difference between whales and true fish, but then calls whales 'fish' in the rest of the book anyway.
If this line of argument doesn't work, I point out that in a phylogenetic/cladistic nomenclature, all tetrapods are fish and dolphins are tetrapods, therefore dolphins are fish (and so are we.) Of course in the traditional nomenclature 'fish' is a paraphyletic group that specifically excludes tetrapods.
> The novel Moby Dick explains in detail the difference between whales and true fish, but then calls whales 'fish' in the rest of the book anyway.
To add a more scientific example, "The Biology and Ecology of Giant Kelp Forests" (2015) similarly begins by explaining that kelp are brown macroalgae belonging in the kingdom Chromista rather than Plantae, and are thus is not technically plants. They then explain that they will call them plants anyway for the rest of the book.
It is, by the way, a surprisingly interesting book. Kelp was vastly more important between 150-100 years ago, and the science occasionally dips back to the scientific age of wonder of the late 1800s. (I always enjoy reading the classic papers from those times. They're written completely differently from modern scientific papers. Much less formal.)
Yeah I'm allergic to tree nuts and it's surprisingly common to have people ask me if coconut is okay. In some cases I've even found restaurant menus where dishes were marked as containing tree nuts just because of coconut.
The people who named Pluto conflated the scientific discovery with an ancient mythology and tradition of wandering stars, as if it were a continuation of it, and now certain people affiliated with the scientific community go around on the Internet telling members of the general public that they're speaking imprecisely about their horoscopes, as if that behavior will have no impact on whether the public will listen to the scientific community on matters like how not to spread covid, vaccines, and climate change.
But as the article says, people don't actually use these terms outside of bar trivia. People who actually want to communicate something in relation to a herd of zebra call them a herd.
Your argument works even better the other way round. Most of these terms of venery are so obscure that the only time they get used is in trivia quizzes.
If, as you seem to say English is decided by usage, then the idea that there is a 'correct' term for a group of bobolinks beyond 'group' is just a fun fiction.
As far as I'm concerned, you're free to describe a group of animals using whatever word conveys the experience best, and since, as you say English lacks a governing council, nobody should worry about using the 'correct' term of venery.
The idea of specific group names for different animals is kinda weird anyway, coming from a non-native speaker. What's the point of having so many? It doesn't provide any extra semantic meaning over just having general "herds" or "groups", since you mostly use the animal name anyway (ie. everyone will say "a murder of crows" instead of just "a murder" to avoid confusion).
I realise that language is mostly not designed and that there is no specific reason, just like gramatical gender is useless for non-gendered things and still many languages have it. but I'm curious about the historical path that led to that differentiation
I feel the point is that there is not much to learn concerning english grammar since it is so simple compared to say french or german so the teacher reach for arcane trivia to fill out the school year.
Maybe it is like english spelling that seems to mainly be designed to not look childish. Murder of crows sounds very poetic compared to flock.
I'm guessing that the origins lie in the oral storytelling tradition, where such phrases would have been used in a poetic way to entertain. And the continued use is just because people find the words amusing and enjoy using them.
I agree. In my humble opinion, the correctness of a word in a given context should be gauged on its utility in communicating a concept. Tomatoes are fruits in a botanical context, but not necessarily in a culinary context. Likewise for the planethood of Pluto, as mentioned elsewhere under this comment.
To hypothesize on a more contentious issue, I think that this ties into contemporary debates on gender identity. The terms "woman" and "man" are ancient and ubiquitous, but only recently seem to be showing as inadequate in certain contexts. Universally defining these terms seems like it would elevate some of these contexts above the others, which would inevitably invite backlash from people for whom these contexts are less common.
Not only that: just because a bunch of people got appointed by the French government, doesn't mean they have any real authority to tell French people how to speak.
Another example from German: in that language, the experts insist that you 'drive' a hot air balloon ('einen Ballon fahren'). Normal people say that you 'fly' a balloon. ('einen Ballon fliegen').
Which one is correct depends on who you talk to. Literally, it depends on your audience.
> it's a murder of crows if most people agree that it's a murder of crows
No, that's not how it works. Each person and each group is their own authority (at least potentially, if they want to be). You're right that the majority may ignore specialist opinion, but it's equally true that specialists may ignore the majority opinion. It's not unusual for usage to diverge in that way. Take the word "allergy", for example.
Classic comedy sketch. There's also a "whoop" of gorillas. It appears that some people think flange is the correct collective noun for baboons, as it subsequently appeared in a televised pub quiz in which someone, taught how to memorize general knowledge facts by Derren Brown, took part.
I read that primatologists adopted flange as well as troop for baboons, which I hope is true, I think there's plenty of scope for whimsy in language.
Sadly it seems the video of that sketch has been blocked or removed from youtube - the best I can find now is a poorly recorded audio - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgxbAjmwUus
This is ridiculously party poopy for really lame reasons. The world is hard, dark, scary and a drag most of the time. Obviously this was written in a different time, but I question the value of recirculating it in this time, when life has all of those negative attributes amplified for almost everyone.
People find joy in discovering weird facts. Even if those facts are about the magic of language we invent and reinvent. Words have no basis in reality except that we use them. Descriptivism is a pointless wet blanket in its own right, but it’s downright cruel when it’s used to revoke perfectly harmless words that bring some ... ahem ... nerds joy.
Not that this or any of it is the worst thing in the world, and I know I’m having an outsized reaction to it. But there’s no need for it, and believe it or not some people find etymology—and the richness of language—a source of some small joy. Some people use that richness, even in its absurdity, as a source to create, as a spring from which art can flow. Art that enriches others, even if they don’t give half a damn about what a nonexistent group of wombats is called.
In the spirit of more lightly thumbing my nose at this whole thing: today I learned that a collective noun for a generalized grouping of animals—and also a word to describe sexual indulgence—is a “venery”. I will henceforth use it to also describe a group of people who crap on harmless joys they can’t relate to.
Making up bullshit or propagating bullshit is always going to have a cost. Admittedly there is a very low cost here.
But there’s also a ridiculously low benefit.
No one, I warrant, will have their life’s happiness seriously impacted by an author urging people to abandon these nonsensical terms. Not even those who write articles about these terms - these are by and large the only people who use them - as it gives them something to struggle against, and we all love a good struggle.
In these uncertain times when life has all of those negative attributes amplified for almost everyone I actually felt excitement and happiness that I am not the only one who has been loathing such bullshit linguistic practices all these years.
I might be being pedantic, but I think of it a little differently. We don't even need to grace these collective nouns with words like fact for them to still be fun. There isn't really a 'fact of the matter' as to whether there's really such a thing as a 'parliament of owls'; it's just a fuzzy matter of adoption in the English language.
I think of it more like knowledge of your favourite TV show, or fiction book. There's a sense in which it's 'real knowledge', and a sense in which it's not, but the point isn't for it to be useful.
I suggest we adopt terms of venery that subtly reflect reality. At work we would speak how of the recommendations from a genius of engineers was ignored by a lunacy of managers. Online we could lament how a delusion of Redditors failed to recognize the wisdom of an omniscience of HN readers. Or how an oppression of downvotes is battling with a glory of upvotes!
Don't get me started on the collective nouns for vim- and emacs-users.
When a Sheriff calls a group of people together, its a posse. But when a group of Representatives come together, its a congress. When people are advising the President, its a cabinet.
But in other situations, people can be a mob... but not to be confused with THE mob (which is apparently a different group of people all together). While mob has negative connotations, "Flash Mobs" are generally positive.
When people are organized into a military group: it can be a squad, brigade, division, corps, or army. You'd think it'd be correlated to size, but the proper term seems inconsistent and not really properly defined.
> When a Sheriff calls a group of people together, its a posse. But when a group of Representatives come together, its a congress. When people are advising the President, its a cabinet.
Posses, congresses, and cabinets (in the US) are all legal distinctions. A group of people doesn't suddenly become a posse because a sheriff assembled them or a cabinet because a president took their advice.
That's also true for the military groups. They are defined not just by size, but by composition (which varies by country and force). If you have 30,000 troops sitting in a crowd at a USO show, they don't suddenly become a corps.
I agree with your overall point but you did not pick particularly confusing examples. Representatives form a Congress only in their specific legal capacity, and if a Sheriff meets with people from a crime scene they would likely be referred to as victims and witnesses, rather than a Posse.
They don't seem to spread joy; I've only ever known them to be used in a kind of smug one-upsmanship. Sharing knowledge is a joy, but actual knowledge is empirically meaningful; words should be tools that help communication, not arbitrarily hinder it.
Yes, I agree. They are fun to learn. Pride of lions, school of fish, covey of quail, troop of monkeys. I wonder sometimes, who came up with these names.
> I wonder sometimes, who came up with these names.
That's literally what this entire article is about.
From the article:
> "After all, these dumb names must have come from somewhere, right? They did—the Middle Ages. The earliest known collection of terms of venery (an archaic term for 'hunting') is in the Book of Saint Albans, a kind of handbook on manliness first published in 1486."
It’s the truest article. I hate? despise? well at least I dislike these ridiculous terms as they are twee and are made up entirely to have a proliferation of names for things.
There ought to be one for a group of ridiculous terms of venery. Let’s call it a nerfball. There are articles that feature a nerfball of terms of venery. Don’t like those articles much either. Yes, I think that’s good.
The real problem with these terms - if there can be said to be a real problem - is that they give the appearance of there being a naturalistic process by which the English language evolves a great deal of flowery diversity. One assumes that, because there are all these apparently used terms, there must be a reason of sorts as to why they evolved.
But there isn’t. They’re just silly things people made up for the purpose of making them up and having funny names for things.
I'm not one of those people, but I'll bite on the second part.
It should be maintained because it's a tool to check if someone is logical and serious or not.
Double negatives in particular make statements harder to reason about. If you can't know if someone means it to be positive or negative in the end (and there are good instances where you need a double negative to mean a positive and can't just restructure easily) then you can't actually know what the person is saying. And I've had plenty of people come back and say they meant the opposite of what I'd assumed from their statement, too.
Contrived example: You're explaining a process and say, "You shouldn't get 'no results' here." Since it's spoken, there's no punctuation to help you understand that "no results" is a phrase and is a result in and of itself. You'd just hear "You shouldn't get no results." and may think that an empty result is desired.
For the others, if people who know good grammar are reading your work, they're going to be distracted by your bad grammar and have less focus for the actual point of your work. If you're serious about getting something done, that should matter to you.
Notice that I keep saying "work", though. In casual conversation, these things don't matter, except to attempt to train people for when they do matter. So mostly they don't matter.
> It should be maintained because it's a tool to check if someone is logical and serious or not.
Do you mean solely double negatives here, or does this also apply to the three other "rules of grammar"? Because those are not actual rules of grammar at all. The split-infintives "rule" came about by a false analogy with Latin (where it is largely impossible to split infinitives, at least present active ones, because they are almost always single words -- e.g. amare, "to love"): Fowler, for one, holds that a split infinitive is preferable "to real ambiguity, and to patent artificiality". The ban on prepositions at the ends of sentences was made up out of whole cloth by Dryden, again with irrelevant reference to Latin. And I think you would be hard pushed to find a writer in the English literary canon who never begins a sentence with a conjunction.
> Double negatives in particular make statements harder to reason about.
That's bad news for French philosophy, then, because formal French demands a double negative in many contexts. E.g., jamais is French for "never", but "I would never do that" is Je ne ferais jamais ça, where ne is the direct equivalent of the English "not". (In informal French, curiously, the ne is often dropped, or so I understand.) Of course, French is not English, but if Francophones can handle double negatives without logical edifices collapsing, I'm sure Anglophones can too.
> You're explaining a process and say, "You shouldn't get 'no results' here."
Then any confusion is my own fault for expressing myself in such a clumsy and ambiguous manner. I should have said either "You should get some results here" or "You shouldn't get the message 'no results' here", depending on whether the presence of results or the absence of the error was the key criterion of success.
My perspective is that people can use whimsical names as in 1. And they must only follow the rules in 2) in formal writing - technical reports, scientific papers, official documentation.
As luck would have it, I actually saw (and heard) a murder of crows today. A dozen or so flying low over the rooftops, cawing as they went. The first thing that popped into my mind was, "It's a murder!"...
As a kid I detested the idiosyncrasies of english language and I would have agreed with the author back then. Orwell's 1984 with its style of writing in the book as a whole and the idea of a simplified english to restrict thoughts in the form of Newspeak really struck a chord and I currently am a firm believer in the need of whimsy in our conversations and life.
One of my other favorite "facts" in there is that if a panda gets struck by lightning, its black parts turn white and its white parts turn black. It is called a "negative panda". If it gets struck by lightning once more, it reverts to its natural coloring and it is called a "double-negative panda", or just a "panda".
Maybe I and my friends are hopelessly pedantic nerds, but we definitely use "murder" to denote a group without using the word "crows" explicitly (e.g. "I saw a murder flying overhead on my way through the meadow").
Generally, this reminds me of proposals to move to a universal time zone.
Even if you could remove the more obscure terms from common usage, there's plenty of literature and music that use them, so people will still need to learn then for historical reasons. This, your pursuit of simplicity actually increases total complexity.
I suppose the difference is that natural languages evolve constantly, so everyone is used to the slow drift as a part of life and occasionally having to look up phrases that have fallen out of use when reading older books.
I can't find anything defining "flock" as having more than a certain number of animals in it, so I would assume 2 owls would be a pair and 3+ owls would be a flock.
I don't see any reason to protest it. If its not something commonly used, that's OK. You can ignore these words if you do not like them, but don't begrudge their existing, who knows what someone might do with them.
It's all explained in the article. These obscure collective nouns started as a joke and aren't used in practice by anyone. However endless trivia lists and pub quizzes say that they are. They are wrong.
> Or heard anyone else use them. A group of birds—any birds— is a “flock.”
This stood out to me more than the rest. Is that really right? A murder of crows could surely be some independent crows that happen to be near to each other. To me, a "flock" of crows, or any other birds, is a group of birds that have some sort of social interaction with each other, which is something rather different. But the author of the article is much more of a bird expert than me (mostly because I'm not one at all).
This argument makes perfect sense in a scientific context. Scientific language used to document the behavior of a species should use the same standards for objective documentation that illustration/photography employ. In this context a bird is most commonly captured in a profile that most clearly illustrates the coloration and pattern of plumage on the crest, chest and wings, the shape and size of the beak and the shape and length of the legs. This standard allows for an accurate representation of a species with no additional encumbrance. Scientific language should, whenever possible, omit flowery linguistic embellishments like terms of venery.
It seems like most of the comments critical of the article are arguments for language without consideration for context.
If I say “there’s a murder outside” my nephew will be racing to get the mealworms.
Just because technical literature is dry and stuffy doesn’t mean we all have to be that way. I know I don’t talk to my friends in third person past tense.
FWIW, in programming languages we similarly fret over overloading of symbols. A common one is the '-' (minus sign) representing subtraction and negation. Or the '+' (plus sign) representing addition and number coercion (JS).
Also, no one likes code golf in prod. But who doesn't at least occasionally enjoy learning from a clever one-liner. 'Venery' terms are just that -- something to learn from despite experts in the field steering well clear of.
> But “murder of crows,” and the like—the ones that people giggle over despite no actual instance of anyone using the term to refer to a flock of crows maybe ever in history—those need to go.
I dunno, crows are known to attack people. And in groups they seem to egg each other on - there were two a few months ago that took turns dive-bombing my head (I only dodged them because of the angle of the sun, I could see their shadow approach).
But what species are you talking about? The article is about Corvus corone, I think, found in Europe and Asia. Americans and Australians use the word "crow" to refer to something else, I think.
So you start out by saying people never say "murder of crows", yet it's very important for you that they stop?
Sounds like a bad case of OCD by proxy. Most people seem to think this is a quaint feature of the English language that is fun to think about, if you don't agree just ignore it. As you say, you can easily avoid hearing the phrases spoken.
> So you start out by saying people never say "murder of crows", yet it's very important for you that they stop?
People never say "murder of crows" etc. when they are actually talking about groups of crows. But they do say "did you know that a group of crows is called a 'murder'? Haha" or "Question 3: What is the collective noun for a group of crows?"
So the OCD is even worse than I feared. He is against other people even _thinking_ that a third set of people might be saying "murder of crows". That's pretty meta.
What would you call it when you have so strong feelings about what people you will never meet or even interact with think about a marginal feature of English? It certainly doesn't seem very sane.
And it's not even that they are wrong, "murder of crows" is definitely correct English. Not just very commonly used.
By the way, asking crow researchers what terms they use is just silly, they are the least likely to be using it, it's not a technical term, it's a quaint old expression - everyone knows that.
All these synonyms! Sure they provide color and delight and history - I mean, granted, language is the very basis of culture, but let’s get rid of it, right? Wouldn’t it be so very drab and samey and clear if we only had one word for things?
These aren't synonyms though. It's pretty normal for someone to say they have a litter that they're trying to unload, but kind of unusual if they're trying to give away a pride.
That may be the case, but it’s pretty amazing that the author found a way to write hundreds of words complaining about the very concept of collective nouns without ever labeling them as such, isn’t it?
A term of venery is a specific type of collective noun: more or less, collective nouns for animals made up by bored aristocrats in the middle ages (or more recently, but in the same tradition). As a result, most are never used in conversation by people who actually work with those animals.
These are also not terms of venery, as OP repeatedly claims. That usage died out in the fourteenth century, and ever since the term has referred to pursuit of sexual pleasure (cf. "venereal disease"). It seems a bit odd to argue against over-specialized terminology by using a term that's both specialized and obsolete.
I'm well aware. I did post the etymonline link, after all. However, it doesn't change anything. The series of glyphs used by the OP author hasn't represented what he meant it to represent for centuries. It's still a deeply archaic usage, whether we're dealing with a single word or two homonyms.
"terms of venery" is still used as a phrase to refer to those collective nouns for animals. Even wikipedia mentions it while describing "collective noun": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun
that "venery" is an outdated word that ~nobody uses in the hunting sense anymore does not mean that the term "terms of venery", which specifically refers to the pattern of words developed during the time the word was used in that context, isn't relevant anymore.
I suspect the author would agree (about the term venery). They even make an aside to explain in the article. They probably selected and used it to demonstrate its archaicness in relation to the other terms.
The author used an archaic collective noun in a way that doesn’t accurately describe the grouping it represents... to needlessly poopoo people doing just that with other words [shrug emoji]
