A book I’ve been working on has an interesting and lovely mention of terms of venery—which are a very special form of collective nouns—and it occured to me that it would be fun to take a look at them.
You know what a collective noun is—team, committee, crowd are all collective nouns. They are words for a collection of things taken as a whole. In the phrase a gang of thieves, gang is a collective noun. A pack of lies. A pair of shoes. A bouquet of flowers. You can use group to collect a lot of things: a group of teachers, a group of books on grammar, a group of symptoms, a group of examples.
But did you know many of these phrases we take for granted date back to medieval times? They do! A school of fish, a pride of lions, a host of angels, a colony of ants … these are so familiar we don’t even think about them. They are terms of venery, and were considered the “correct” way to refer to groups of fish, lions, angels, or ants.
Terms of venery arose as a part of French and English hunting terminology in the thirteenth century; they’d begun to be codified by the fifteenth century in the Book of Saint Albans (1486). The imagery and poetry of them is inspiring, don’t you think?
- a murder of crows
- a leap of leopards
- a party of jays
- a pitying of turtledoves
- a paddling of ducks
- a crash of rhinoceroses
- a labor of moles
- a siege of herons
- a charm of finches
- a skein of geese (in flight)
- a gaggle of geese (on water)
- a tidings of magpies
- a troop of kangaroos
- an unkindness of ravens
- a mustering of storks
- a cry of players (a troupe of actors, sixteenth century)
- a clowder of cats
- a shrewdness of apes
- a parliament of owls
- a murmuration of starlings
- an exaltation of larks
James Lipton, the author of An Exaltation of Larks or, The Veneral Game (Penguin Books, 1968, 1977) from which I pulled this list, tells us that yes, many of the terms were humorous. In the Book of Saint Albans, nearly half the terms “refer not to animals but to people and life in the fifteenth century and every one of these social venereal terms makes the same kind of affectionate or mordant comment that the strictly field terms do.” To wit:
- a superfluity of nuns
- a diligence of messengers
- a converting of preachers
- a state of princes
- an impatience of wives
- a prudence of vicars
- an impertinence of peddlers
- a fighting of beggars
- a smirk of couriers
- a riffraff of knaves
- a rage of maidens
- a wandering of tinkers
- a rascal of boys
- a worship of writers
Lipton goes on to present more modern phrases that he’s collected over the years and invites readers to make up their own. (As noted in my murmuration post, the Irishman came up with a puke of politicians, which made me laugh out loud.) Go ahead—play the game!
Tweet: Did you know many of these poetic collective nouns date back to medieval times?
Tweet: A murder of crows, a pitying of turtledoves, a charm of finches, an exaltation of larks …
Tweet: “A puke of politicians.” Go ahead—play the venereal game!
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