Four and twenty blackbirds
I have always been
fascinated by collective nouns, some so interesting you wonder how they come
about. On my walks a few days ago, I came across an interesting sight, blackbirds
I thought were crows or even rooks had settled upon the poles of a fence, but
when I was speaking to the lady with her companion that feeds the birds, the
other day, I used the collective noun embarrassment which I knew was wrong and
she suggested parliament.
A parliament of crows,
I thought when I next went by, but it was another few days before I saw a
sufficient number settle on the poles of the fences to make it necessary to take
a picture and tell a story. Then, she might be correct if the
blackbirds were rooks rather than crows; the collective nouns are, a murder of
crows or a parliament of rooks. Apparently, the collective noun for crows comes
from superstition; the belief that they are harbingers of death sent by the
devil or are witches in disguise.
An embarrassment of
SANs
Rightly, it is an
embarrassment of pandas, but I have also applied that collective noun to SANs, SeniorAdvocates of Nigeria, senior lawyers that the influential troop to the
courts to intimidate the prosecution and the bench, usually in the tens that
the cost of justice is prohibitive even when the defendant is guilty as sin but
has more legal firepower than the state can muster.
I will not go into
the list of collective nouns, but one that anyone would love to know for trivia
is the collective noun for geese, they are a gaggle of geese on land, a skein
of geese in flight and a plump of geese in water. Never give the wrong
collective noun to the appearance of things or you are set for, should I say,
am embarrassment?
References
Country Life: Collective nouns for birds
Merriam-Webster: A Melody of Harpers and a Poverty of Pipers
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are accepted if in context are polite and hopefully without expletives and should show a name, anonymous, would not do. Thanks.