TWIL #003 - Collective Nouns for Humans are Underrated
We have collective nouns for animals - a murder of crows, a parliament of owls - so why not for humans? Turns out some exist, and they're excellent.
- #language
- #fun
- #linguistics
English has wonderfully specific collective nouns for animals: a murmuration of starlings, a parliament of owls, a bloat of hippos. These terms have history - many come from 15th-century hunting manuals and were used as a form of wordplay by educated courtiers.
The tradition for human groups never quite caught on the same way, but some proposals are too good to ignore:
- A flamboyance of comedians
- A homicide of goths
- A glitch of tech bros
- A discordance of band kids
- A gaggle of geese
- An annoyance of cyclists
- A competence of blue-collared men
These work because a good collective noun captures something true about the group's essence - not just what they are, but how they move through the world together.
The linguistic mechanism is the same as the animal ones: the noun acts as a kind of compressed metaphor. A "murder" of crows works because crows were historically associated with death and bad omens. A "parliament" of owls works because owls were associated with wisdom and deliberation. The noun does characterisation work in a single word.
What would you call a group of DevOps engineers? A rollback? An incident?