Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, have you ever heard of a group
Speaker 1: of ferrets called a business of ferrets? Or a collection
Speaker 1: of jellyfish referred to as a smack of jellyfish? What
Speaker 1: about a shrewdness of apes? We use collective nouns, also
Speaker 1: known as nouns of assemblage to describe all sorts of groups.
Speaker 1: Hosts of angels, bands of men, and shocks of corn
Speaker 1: are commonly heard these days, but the nouns associated with
Speaker 1: particular groupings of animals can get weird fast because words
Speaker 1: and their uses are invented by people. When we see
Speaker 1: a bunch of a specific construction, you can bet on
Speaker 1: it being the result of a language fad, And sure enough,
Speaker 1: five hundred years ago, nouns of assemblage were all the rage.
Speaker 1: We spoke via email with Magdalene Jacobs, a pH d
Speaker 1: candidate in the Vanderbilt University Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences.
Speaker 1: She said, these are generally terms that came about from
Speaker 1: upper class hunting culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Speaker 1: They're called terms of venery, and they're linked to Norman
Speaker 1: culture and influence and the idea of proper hunting language.
Speaker 1: Over a hundred and sixty terms of venery are listed
Speaker 1: in the Book of St Alban's, a wildly popular at
Speaker 1: the time manner's guide published in fourteen eighty six that
Speaker 1: coached the medieval gentleman through having conversations about hunting, falconry, fishing, sports,
Speaker 1: and heraldry without embarrassing himself at dinner parties. These collective
Speaker 1: nouns are found in a chapter entitled the Companies of
Speaker 1: Beasts and Fowls, though some of the terms referred to
Speaker 1: people rather than animals. A bit of a joke, the
Speaker 1: Book of Saint Alban's not only described as sleuth of
Speaker 1: bears and a skulk of foxes, but also linked women
Speaker 1: to geese in the collective consciousness by labeling collections of
Speaker 1: both gaggles. According to Jacobs, this is partially because there
Speaker 1: is a direct linguistic link from the word gaggle to
Speaker 1: the Middle English word for cackle. A collection of wives
Speaker 1: was labeled and impatience a group of writers, on the
Speaker 1: other hand, was called a ship. If language tells us
Speaker 1: how to think about the world, we can see the
Speaker 1: fifteenth century European gentlemen's social priorities, though, of course, because
Speaker 1: you can't keep the kids from making up slang. Once
Speaker 1: the construction was introduced in the Book of St Alban's,
Speaker 1: people started coining their own nouns of assemblage. Although a
Speaker 1: lot of these terms slipped into obscurity in the sixteenth century,
Speaker 1: like much of the lingo we generate on a continual basis,
Speaker 1: some of them were adopted into common speech. These days.
Speaker 1: We don't often have occasion to talk about a sneer
Speaker 1: of butlers or a misbelief of portrait painters, But whoever
Speaker 1: came up with a staff of employees, a congregation of churchgoers,
Speaker 1: or a panel of judges should congratulate themselves on a
Speaker 1: job well done. Linguistically speaking, much of the time, the
Speaker 1: correct term for a group of anything lets us know
Speaker 1: our collective views on the disposition of whatever we're naming.
Speaker 1: Some of the most evocative terms of venery can be
Speaker 1: found in birds the Book of St Alban's lists and
Speaker 1: unkindness of ravens and a murder of crows definitely creepy negatives,
Speaker 1: but a charm of finches adorable. Whoever first referred to
Speaker 1: a college of cardinals was probably suggesting they thought the
Speaker 1: group of little red birds looked like a meeting of academics.
Speaker 1: But why a group of storks is called a mustering
Speaker 1: is a little less clear. C. S. Lewis coined the
Speaker 1: term parliament of owls in his children's book series The
Speaker 1: Chronicles of Narnia, a nod to Chaucer's poem A Parliament
Speaker 1: of Fowls. The term is now recognized in dictionaries as
Speaker 1: being the correct term for a group of owls. There
Speaker 1: are meanwhile, few nouns of assemblage for insects mentioned in
Speaker 1: the Book of Saint Albans. We still refer to a
Speaker 1: swarm of bees, which was recorded in the book, but
Speaker 1: we don't talk as much about a business of flies
Speaker 1: or a flock of lice. If you've ever heard of
Speaker 1: a kindle of kittens, that comes from the Middle English
Speaker 1: word kindle in which meant to give birth or produce
Speaker 1: a litter, which was originally used only for puppies, but
Speaker 1: is now commonly used for all kinds baby animals. A
Speaker 1: group of adult cats might be a glaring or a pounce,
Speaker 1: but a crowd of feral hats is a destruction. Anyone
Speaker 1: concerned about the decline of migrating songbirds can understand why
Speaker 1: that might be. Dogs, which were as much a man's
Speaker 1: best friend in the Middle Ages as today, got a
Speaker 1: lot of play. In the Book of Saint Alban's, hunting
Speaker 1: hounds alone got several group titles a cry, a mute,
Speaker 1: a pack, and a kennel. Some of the most inventive
Speaker 1: terms of venery are applied to wild animals, and Jacob
Speaker 1: said because they began as hunting terms. The original names
Speaker 1: from the Book of Saint Alban's reflected a specific societal
Speaker 1: disposition towards the animal being hunted. A pride of lions
Speaker 1: is a good example. Others that came later, such as
Speaker 1: a wisdom of wombats, may be inaccurate, as wombats are
Speaker 1: rather solitary and don't spend time in groups. Others likely
Speaker 1: referred to qualities of the animals themselves. A business of
Speaker 1: ferrets came from a business of ferrets, which makes more
Speaker 1: sense than business if you've spent any time at all
Speaker 1: watching ferrets. These days, folks continue to make up new
Speaker 1: nouns of assemblage and bring back old ones. Thus we
Speaker 1: can talk about a prickle of hedgehogs, an obstinacy of Buffalo,
Speaker 1: a bloat of hippos, and a game of whales regardless
Speaker 1: of whether we're planning on hunting them or not. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by Jesselyn Shields and produced by Tyler
Speaker 1: Clang for iHeart Media and how Stuff Works. For more
Speaker 1: on this and a wonder of other topics, visit our
Speaker 1: home planet, how stuff works dot com.