Dave Ganly writes:
Might be up your collective streets: myself and the girlfriend made this yesterday, while hungover.
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Dave Ganly writes:
Might be up your collective streets: myself and the girlfriend made this yesterday, while hungover.
I think collective nouns, for the most-part are either a waste of time, or a pretentious affectation.
Beyond shoals of fish, flocks of birds, herds of cattle etc it’s perfectly fine to say a ‘group’ instead of ridiculous contrived phrases like a ‘murder of crows’ or a ‘harass of horses’ – which sounds more like animal cruelty than description of a group, and is of no practical use other than to answer an obscure question on QI.
I say the collective term for collective terms is a ‘redundancy’.
Take that, Dave Ganly and his wife. That’ll teach you to be productive while hungover
Ah, it’s a fun game for passing the time, or for poetic literature, but can you imagine if someone told you that you were not using correct English if you referred to a swarm of jellyfish instead of a fluther of the feckers?
Being understood is rather central to communication.
It’s a school of fish, a shoal of herring
Dave – you spelled school wrong mate in your graphic, nice game
Can you give me any good reason why there should be a different collective noun for
ghotifish, and herring?Good reason 1. For folk who fish herring
Good reason 2. For folk who study herring
Good reason 3. For folk who create / observe distracting clues.
That’s not a good reason for using a different term depending on which species of fish it is, nor for anyone to consider a ‘shoal of fish’ to be an invalid term.
There are those who will even argue that it’s not species dependent, but behaviour dependent, and that ‘schooling’ and ‘shoaling’ are different types of gatherings of fish, but that’s a different (and boringly pedantic) argument which is not as clear cut as saying that a group of geese can only be a gaggle when not in flight.
Collective nouns are just makey-up, lyrical flourishes. A school or shoal of fish is fine for any type of fish. Likewise a flock of any kind of bird. People getting worked up about this are just a bunch of ****s.
Likewise, anyone who wants to use whatever collective noun to describe whatever collection of nouns is perfectly entitled to do so without being sniped at by some adjectival collection of nouns
+ a glimmering of upvotes.
Ye olde shower of language-haters!!
A sadness of Sams
+1 Now, that would be a context appropriate use!
plus this game is BULL.
Played twice and it changes the correct answers.
^^ There are multiple sets of correct and incorrect answers, as there are multiple correct collective nouns for certain animals. There are also 27 different animals.
There are more than 27 different animals. I seen ‘Noah’ and there was a lot more than that on his big boat like.
:)
A Fluther of Jellyfish.
I like it.
A fun distraction for a scum of Dubliners and an inbreeding of Culchies both.
A guffaw of commenters
An ahjayzis of derisive collective nouns.
A hoop of witty rejoinders
5/10 I’m stupid
A ‘bolus’ of wankers is my favorite.
Uh…. “our” perhaps?