{"id":231,"date":"2014-06-18T23:23:59","date_gmt":"2014-06-18T23:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/?p=231"},"modified":"2014-09-19T10:44:32","modified_gmt":"2014-09-19T10:44:32","slug":"collective-nouns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/?p=231","title":{"rendered":"Collective Nouns"},"content":{"rendered":"

What do you call a pair of crows? Answer – attempted murder.<\/p>\n

This type of joke is from a genre called highbrow humour. Why… because you have to have some specific knowledge before you can understand the joke. In this attempted murder case (pun intended<\/em>) you have to know that the collective noun for three or more crows is a murder. Ah, now the joke makes sense… and leads us nicely into what this post is actually about i.e. collective nouns.<\/p>\n

It never ceases to amaze me just how many collective nouns there are in the English language. For example, we have a\u00a0murder<\/em>\u00a0of crows (you knew that!), a\u00a0belt<\/em>\u00a0of asteroids, a cackle<\/em> of hyenas, a\u00a0flight<\/em>\u00a0of stairs, a sentence<\/em> of judges, an impatience<\/em> of wives and a\u00a0den<\/em>\u00a0of thieves. These ones are fairly normal and, I’d guess, fairly widely known. If you Google ‘collective nouns’ you’ll find a wealth of words describing nearly every group imaginable. Even with the abundance\u00a0of official collective nouns, there are still a lot of groups which have yet to be allocated their own special word.<\/p>\n

Here are a few suggestions which could\u00a0fill the some of the gaps:<\/p>\n
    \n
  • A\u00a0blaze\u00a0of firemen<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0smothering\u00a0of Social Workers<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0gathering\u00a0of combine harvesters<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0shoal\u00a0of nudists<\/li>\n
  • A wunch of bankers<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0collection\u00a0of philatelists<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0camp\u00a0of bell-ringers<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0heard\u00a0of listeners<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0number\u00a0of mathematicians<\/li>\n
  • A\u00a0drift\u00a0of castaways<\/li>\n
  • A pouch of Chewbaccas<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
    Any more for any more? For example, what is the above group of collective nouns called?<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    What do you call a pair of crows? Answer – attempted murder. This type of joke is from a genre called highbrow humour. Why… because you have to have some specific knowledge before you can understand the joke. In this attempted murder case (pun intended) you have to know that the collective noun for three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":247,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,17],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-writers-block","tag-collective-nouns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=231"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":644,"href":"https:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231\/revisions\/644"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kenmageeauthor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}