Those Curious Collective Nouns

 

     The examples here are largely, but not entirely, included in Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks.  Like Lipton, I do not use the Middle English since entertainment rather than philology or literary criticism is my goal. 

 

     We commonly use collective nouns: a bunch of keys, a row of houses, a group of lakes.  The majority of such terms are readily transferable in reference; one might equally speak of a bunch of flowers, a row of beans, or a group of actors.  Some are narrower in usage, including many which have to do with animals: a herd of cattle, a pack of wolves, a pride of lions.   There are herds of various beasts, but all are plant-eating mammals.  Pack may be used of other animals, but is strongly associated with wolves, and pride is used exclusively of lions.  Certain of the collective nouns are similarly specific to a certain species, but in addition seem unusually artful, sometimes a bit precious.  The best-known of this class is probably “a murder of crows,” which seems quaint enough to be suspicious.

     Many of these collective nouns refer to animals, and they strike the reader as self-consciously clever because many were indeed invented as a special fanciful vocabulary in the late Middle Ages.  Familiarity with these neologisms was then an index of how au courant a courtly pretender might prove to be.  Though all words have a sort of poetry, especially for readers who know their etymologies, these terms, mostly to do with hunting, were from the first showpieces, meant to impress and amuse.

     James Lipton’s book An Exaltation of Larks (1968) listed many of this special variety of collective nouns, bringing widespread publicity to a somewhat obscure linguistic phenomenon and demonstrating that the imaginative appeal of these neologisms had survived the centuries.  Though I saw the book everywhere back then, I never read it, taking it for a novelty gift, presenting these overly cutesy terms with quaintly old-fashioned illustrations.  I thereby missed until today reading Lipton’s well-informed introduction which provides a satisfying explanatory background.

     Often applying a new meaning to an existing word (“a prickle of porcupines” or “a skulk of foxes”), these morsels of wit were recorded in “courtesy books,” manuals laying down the rules for genteel behavior and sometimes in specific lists of “terms of venery,” a word rarely used today and easily confuised with its exact homograph which in fact has an altogether different meaning and origin.  One “venery” is derived from Latin venari, “to hunt,” the source as well of the English term venison, which once referred to the flesh of any large animal.  (The other venery, with roots in Venus, the goddess of love is the one Benjamin Franklin had in mind when he advised his [illegitimate] son, “rarely use venery but for health or offspring.”)

     Since the reliefs of royal hunts in Assyria and Egypt, nobles whose business was war had whiled away months of peace by practicing their equestrian and archery skills in hunting.  (Compare the brandishing of firearms by today's neo-fascists.)  Killing beasts is a mark of power as is killing people, but in time the bloody pastime of hunting had acquired an aesthetic dimension.  One was to behave with savoir faire even in butchery.  In Gottfried’s Tristan when King Mark first encounters the hero, he is impressed by two of Tristan’s accomplishments.  He notes that Tristan uses “words polished and well-chosen,” and is besides such a skilled and innovative practitioner in cutting up a deer that the king immediately offers to make him master of the hunt.  Both skills prove him “courtois.”

     Manuals began to appear to teach aristocrats and those who wished to be aristocratic the prized qualities of cultivation, elegance, and sophistication.  Best-known of such volumes was Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528) which defined the ideals of behavior that marked a true nobleman, including skill at loving women, playing music, making witty conversation, dressing well, and a host of other “aesthetic” accomplishments.  Castiglione was far from the first to compose such a self-help guide.  The earliest in England is the Book of the Civilized Man by Daniel of Beccles, also known as the Liber Urbani, which appeared circa 1200.  The “terms of venery,” of which a few, including a special vocabulary for animal droppings, had been printed earlier, for instance in William Twiti’s L'Art de vénerie (1328), gained popularity with The Book of St Albans (ca. 1452).  This volume, which contained essays on hawking and heraldry as well as hunting, included seventy collective nouns.  This book anticipated Emily Post in that it was written by a woman, Dame Juliana Berners.  Later writers copied and expanded her list and in 1595 Gervase Markham republished the St. Albans book with his own comments as The Gentleman's Academie, in 1595, bringing its content a new audience.

     The terms of venery and associated collective nouns illustrate several significant aspects of what might be called linguistic sociology.  They exemplify the employment of words not in common usage to establish a subculture, in this case the feudal ruling class, the nobility.  Just as inner city youth use a distinctive jargon, scholars ornament their monographs with currently fashionable academic jargon, and military people signal their vocation with a special argot, courtiers made lexical choices that testified to their identity as cultivated members of the ruling class.

     Apart from this social function, the terms are witty after the manner of other artful uses of language, such as riddles, jokes, and poetry.  Some suggest similes.  A pod of seals is so named due to the resemblance between a group of animals, especially when slumbering on the beach, and a pod of peas.  A group of whales is a gam, the word used as well for a social encounter of two ships in the open sea.  A “siege of herons” is so named because of the animals’ patient observation of shallow waters watching for prey.

     Many sorts of metonymy are represented.  A “slate of candidates” is current yet today, though few are aware that it was first used because of politicians’ names being displayed on slates in front of town halls. 

     Some are so familiar that they make little impression.  We know a “swarm of bees” “host of angels.”  Mysteries may yet linger about even well-known expressions.  “Bevy” is first recorded in the fifteenth century describing either quails or women, apparently derived from French bevée, perhaps from the birds frequenting ponds and the ladies drinking parties.  A "school of fish” may be a corruption of “shoal” (=shallows) or may have independently arisen from school meaning classroom.   

     Sometimes the word has shifted in sound or become obsolete so that its origin is not evident, as in “a clowder of cats” said to derive from the word cluster.  “A singular of boars” oddly contradicts itself, as the French sanglier is derived from Latin singularis porcus, a lone hog, used for a solitary individual wild boar.  A “kindle of kittens” sounds very cute with its source in the Middle English kindlen, to give birth and “covey of partridges” from the Latin cubare, to lie down, describing nesting habits. 

     The sound of doves strikes many as sounding sad.  This is the source not only of the name “mourning dove” but of the collective “a dule of doves” from the French deuil (lamenting).  Similarly, a “murmuration of starlings” refers to the sound made by the swarming of the birds.  Hair-splitting definitions were sometimes propounded.  While a “committee of vultures” is at rest, a “kettle” of them is in flight, and a “wake” of them is feeding. 

     Among the amusing social terms, describing people rather than animals, are the unimaginative doctrine of doctors and school of clerks and the somewhat more amusing “sentence of judges” and “draught of bottlers.”  Others are more pointedly satirical: a “superfluity of nuns," an “impatience of wives,” and a “disworship of Scots,” not to mention the strong but clumsy “abominable sight of monks.”  One might speak also of “a riffraff of knaves,” “a squat of daubers” (those who repair hedgerows and fences), a “diligence of messengers” (from which the coach called a diligence derives its name), and a “skulk of thieves” (a collective they share with foxes).  Perhaps the funniest, though it is somewhat obscure is an “incredibility of cuckolds.”

     Lipton quotes an exchange from Sir Nigel, a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle set in the fourteenth century that imagines the social context in which these terms of venery were significant.  A certain experienced knight, Sir John, quizzes Nigel on his knowledge of this special vocabulary, telling him that “no man of gentle birth” would fail to know these terms, but that “none can say that they know [them] all.”

      Finally, the modern enjoyment in resurrecting these words indicates a taste for the curious and antiquarian similar to that of over-educated Victorian clergymen, people who do rubbings of old gravestones, even the proprietor who calls his store Ye Olde Something Shoppe. The popularity of Lipton’s book in the ‘sixties suggests that era’s sympathy for unfettered imagination.  And what other motive might there be for you, dear reader, to have spent a few moments with this brief disquisition?  The wits of over half a millennium ago are, it seems, entertaining still.