A Memory of Elephants – and other collectives.

A dray of squirrels makes me lose my religion in the midst of public scrutiny. While, overhead, a gulp of swallows heads back to San Juan Capistrano. I wonder to myself who thought up these strange, peculiar and somewhat hilarious naming conventions.

Sometimes the descriptive names for groups of animals (collectives) are terribly suitable. For instance, a pit of snakes could not possibly be more appropriately called. And, no one is going to tell me there could be a better, more accurate name for a group of mosquitoes than a “scourge.”

Nevertheless, it only gets better when you get into the lesser known ones. A still relatively well-known naming is a murder of crows. A group of cows, however, is not called a herd. It is a kine of cows. If you are clumping the bulls and cows under the collective of “cattle,” then it is a team, herd or drove of cattle. Some names have multiple applications, for instance you can have a pod of dolphins, or a pod of pelicans.

There is a bed of oysters. The term “a barrel of monkeys” is literally correct. A gathering of mice is called – again, appropriately – a “mischief of mice.” Then we have the more amusing collectives:

A lounge of lizards.

A sault of lions.

An ascension of larks.

A mob of kangaroos.

A cackle of hyenas.

A bloat of hippopotamuses. (I feel this one is somewhat cruel.) Ditto with a confusion of guinea fowl. (They aren’t the most brilliant of birds.)

I did a little more research and found some even stranger collective names. Here are a few of my favorites:

A party of jays.

A leap of leopards.

A smack of jellyfish.

A tower of giraffes.

An implausibility of gnus. (I think this collective name is so brilliant as to be ridiculous.)

A knot of frogs.

An army of caterpillars.

A memory of elephants. (Yep. That is a good one.)

A pitying of turtle doves.

A cast of crabs.

A quiver of cobras.

And, of course, you have those that go beyond description and into warning:

A destruction of wild cats.

A siege of bitterns.

A bask (or float) of crocodiles.

A wreck of sea birds.

A shrewdness of apes.

 

And, my very favorite collective name: an intrusion of cockroaches!

 

Isn’t English fun?

 

So, what did you learn today? Something cool?  Please share! We all love to learn, right?

~Peace