RE: https://layer8.space/@killyourfm/115902116288619410
I have to ask: Where _did_ all those English-language terms for specific groups of animals come from (such as "a murder of crows", "a pride of lions", and so forth?
Did they develop naturally over the century, or did some bored Victorian come up with them and invented one such term after another before they could be stopped?
@juergen_hubert I don't understand why it's not "a coalition of koalas"
@juergen_hubert They're terms of "venery" (hunting) and were used as social markers to establish if a hunter was a "gentleman hunter" or just some commoner scum. I think the earliest catalogue of them was The Book of St. Albans (15th century).
So ... they developed semi-organically as a tool to distinguish gentry hunters from commoner slime hunters in Medieval times, basically.
They kind of faded out of use long before the Victorians and came back into fashion in the mid-20th century.
@juergen_hubert i stumbled over the murder of crows just yesterday. The words shaping our thinking - i'm so grateful that I'm able to switch between languages.
My understanding is that it was popular to make up names for groups (not just animals) in early modern England. Much latter people assumed that the popular names were “official”.
@juergen_hubert
It might just be a thing literary English does, but I bet most of them were creatively invented after the pattern of a few traditional ones.
Murder of crows seems like it would have happened organically. England has a lot of crows.
We don't have any lions, but now pride has a meaning in zoology; it's not just "some lions", it's a family group of them with a social structure, so it's not really a collective noun any more.
@juergen_hubert "a vapidity of victorians"
@juergen_hubert
I saw, just a few weeks ago, that they basically were all invented by one full-of-themselves jerk centuries ago
