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Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren vogel Bomb here with a classic episode of the podcast.

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Speaker 1: In this one, we get into the weird and wonderful

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Speaker 1: grammatical world of how groups of animals got their names.

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Speaker 1: The basic answer is that before people had Netflix, they

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Speaker 1: had to make their own fun Hey brain Stuff, Lauren

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Speaker 1: vogel Bomb here. Have you ever heard of a group

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Speaker 1: of ferrets called a business of ferrets? Or a collection

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Speaker 1: of jellyfish referred to as a smack of jellyfish? What

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Speaker 1: about a shrewdness of apes? We use collective nouns, also

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Speaker 1: known as nouns of assemblage, to describe all sorts of groups.

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Speaker 1: Hosts of angels, bands of men, and shocks of corn

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Speaker 1: are commonly heard these days, but the nouns associated with

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Speaker 1: particular groupings of animals can get weird fast because words

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Speaker 1: and their uses are invented by people. When we see

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Speaker 1: a bunch of a specific construction, you can bet on

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Speaker 1: it being the result of a language fad, and sure enough,

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Speaker 1: five hundred years ago, nouns of assemblage were all the rage.

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Speaker 1: We spoke via email with Magdalen Jacobs, a pH d.

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Speaker 1: Candidate in the Vanderbilt University Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences.

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Speaker 1: She said these are generally terms that came about from

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Speaker 1: upper class hunting culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

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Speaker 1: They're called terms of venery, and they're linked to Norman

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Speaker 1: culture and influence and the idea of proper hunting language.

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Speaker 1: Over one hundred and sixty terms of venery are listed

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Speaker 1: in the Book of Saint Albans, a wildly popular at

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Speaker 1: the time manner's guide published in fourteen eighty six that

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Speaker 1: coached the medieval gentleman through having conversations about hunting, falconry, fishing, sports,

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Speaker 1: and heraldry without embarrassing himself at dinner parties. These collective

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Speaker 1: nouns are found in a chapter entitled the Companies of

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Speaker 1: Beasts and Fowls, though some of the terms referred to

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Speaker 1: people rather than animals. A bit of a joke, the

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Speaker 1: Book of Saint Albans not only described a sleuth of

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Speaker 1: bears and a skulk of foxes, but also linked women

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Speaker 1: to geese in the collective consciousness by labeling collections of

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Speaker 1: both gaggles. According to Jacobs, this is partially because there

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Speaker 1: is a direct linguistic link from the word gaggle to

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Speaker 1: the Middle English word for cackle. A collection of wives

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Speaker 1: was labeled an impatience. A group of writers, on the

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Speaker 1: other hand, was called a worship. If language tells us

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Speaker 1: how to think about the world, we can see the

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Speaker 1: fifteenth century European gentlemen's social priorities. Though, of course, because

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Speaker 1: you can't keep the kids from making up slang. Once

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Speaker 1: the construction was introduced in the Book of Saint Albans,

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Speaker 1: people started coining their own nouns of assemblage. Although a

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Speaker 1: lot of these terms slipped into obscurity in the sixteenth century,

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Speaker 1: like much of the lingo we generate on a continual basis,

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Speaker 1: some of them were adopted into common speech. These days.

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Speaker 1: We don't often have occasion to talk about a sneer

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Speaker 1: of butlers or a misbelief of portrait painters, But whoever

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Speaker 1: came up with a staff of employees, a congregation of churchgoers,

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Speaker 1: or a panel of judges should congratulate themselves on a

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Speaker 1: job welled. Linguistically speaking, much of the time, the correct

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Speaker 1: term for a group of anything lets us know our

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Speaker 1: collective views on the disposition of whatever we're naming. Some

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Speaker 1: of the most evocative terms of venery can be found

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Speaker 1: in birds. The Book of Saint Albans lists an unkindness

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Speaker 1: of ravens and a murder of crows definitely creepy negatives,

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Speaker 1: but a charm of finches adorable. Whoever first referred to

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Speaker 1: a college of cardinals was probably suggesting they thought the

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Speaker 1: group of little red birds looked like a meeting of academics.

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Speaker 1: But why a group of storks is called a mustering

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Speaker 1: is a little less clear. C. S. Lewis coined the

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Speaker 1: term parliament of owls in his children's book series The

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Speaker 1: Chronicles of Narnia, a nod to Chaucer's poem A Parliament

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Speaker 1: of Fowls. The term is now recognized in dictionaries as

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Speaker 1: being the correct term for a group of owls. There are, meanwhile,

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Speaker 1: few nouns of assemblage for insects mentioned in the Book

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Speaker 1: of Saint Albans. We still refer to a swarm of bees,

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Speaker 1: which was recorded in the book, but we don't talk

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Speaker 1: as much about a business of flies or a flock

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Speaker 1: of lice. If you've ever heard of a kindle of kittens,

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Speaker 1: that comes from the Middle English word kindolin, which meant

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Speaker 1: to give birth or produce a litter, which was originally

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Speaker 1: used only for puppies, but is now commonly used for

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Speaker 1: all kinds of baby animals. A group of adult cats

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Speaker 1: might be a glaring or a pounce, but a crowd

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Speaker 1: of feral cats is a destruction. Anyone concerned about the

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Speaker 1: decline of migrating songbirds can understand why that might be. Dogs,

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Speaker 1: which were as much a man's best friend in the

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Speaker 1: Middle Ages as today, got a lot of play in

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Speaker 1: the Book of Saint Albans. Hunting hounds alone got several

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Speaker 1: group titles, a cry, a mute, a pack, and a kennel.

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Speaker 1: Some of the most inventive terms of venery are applied

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Speaker 1: to wild animals, Jacob said, because they began as hunting terms.

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Speaker 1: The original names from the Book of Saint Albans reflected

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Speaker 1: a specific societal disposition towards the animal being hunted. A

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Speaker 1: pride of lions is a good example. Others that came later,

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Speaker 1: such as a wisdom of wombats, may be inaccurate, as

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Speaker 1: wombats are rather solitary and don't spend time in groups.

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Speaker 1: Others likely referred to qualities of the animals themselves. A

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Speaker 1: business of ferrets came from a busyness of ferrets, which

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Speaker 1: makes more sense than business if you've spent any time

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Speaker 1: at all watching ferrets. These days, folks continue to make

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Speaker 1: up new nouns of assemblage and bring back old ones.

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Speaker 1: Thus we can talk about a prickle of hedgehogs, an

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Speaker 1: obstinacy of buffalo, a bloat of hippos, and a gam

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Speaker 1: of whales, regardless of whether we're planning on hunting them

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Speaker 1: or not. Today's episode is based on the article a

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Speaker 1: shrewdness of apes. Collective nouns are a five hundred year

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Speaker 1: old language fad on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Jesslinshields.

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