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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

I've had six ferrets at a time. Whoever coined "barrel of monkeys" never met a business of ferrets: a swirling ball of play, character, and mischief looking for trouble. They'll steal anything not tied down and hide it under the couch usually. Their favorite toy is a length of dryer exhaust hose: they spend hours running through and ambushing whoever comes out the end.

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Thank you for introducing me to the fact that a collection of ferrets is called a "business".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferret#Etymology

>> A male ferret is called a hob; a female ferret is a jill. A spayed female is a sprite, a neutered male is a gib, and a vasectomised male is known as a hoblet. Ferrets under one year old are known as kits. A group of ferrets is known as a "business", or historically as a "busyness". Other purported collective nouns, including "besyness", "fesynes", "fesnyng", and "feamyng", appear in some dictionaries, but are almost certainly ghost words. <<

This reminds me, that an old name for a rabbit is a "coney", and an old name for a rabbit warren is a "coney-borough", a fortified town of rabbits. Over time, that became simply "burrow".

Pronounced, originally, to rhyme with "honey" and "money". The obvious vulgar homophony explains why the word is obsolete today and, when it is used (as, for example, in the toponym "Coney Island"), is invariably pronounced to rhyme with "phony" and "bony." Mind you, the pun would already have been perceived in the original Latin (cuniculus/cunnus) and indeed this pair may ultimately be related; cuniculus (whence also conejo, coniglio, coelho, Kanin[chen], etc.) meant not just "rabbit" but also "rabbit hole."

> Pronounced, originally, to rhyme with "honey" and "money".

Or "bunny"? :-)

Of course, that word is of a completely different etymology (Scottish).

Interesting, since the dutch word for rabbit is 'Konijn', pronounced like 'konen'.

In scandinavian languages (including Finnish, which hints at the fact that they don't have a lot of rabbits there) it's very similar: "kanin", pronounced ka-neen. Apparently it traces via old French and German back to the Latin "cuniculus" which actually means rabbit.

Meanwhile, "hare" (or "Hase" in German) remains also in English.

Coney Island in NY is named for the Dutch, "Rabbit Island"

Spain was named by the Phoenicians after the huge number of rabbits they saw there. But they had no word for rabbit, so they used their word for hyraxes.

Which are, by the way, the closest extant taxon to the elephants. Which themselves are named just for their thick skin.

Hyraxes, in turn, look rather like chunky ferrets. As you say, they aren't closely related, but i suppose if you're a mammal which lives in holes in the ground, there aren't many body shapes which work.

As both Dutch and English are West Germanic languages, close cognates are pretty common

Coinín in Irish.

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Learn the ONE WEIRD TRICK Ferret owners are going CRAZY over.

In fact, most of the English "terms of venery", the collective nouns for groups of animals, have been simply made up with a rather obvious humorous intent. It is a testament to some sort of linguistic OCD disorder to keep insisting that these are actual terms- I doubt anybody has ever practically referred to groups of ferrets as "businesses", groups of owls as "parliaments", groups of hyenas as "cowardices" or groups of butterflies as "kaleidoscopes". These terms are not born of usage and have basically only ever served as displays of erudition. It would be time for the English language to recognize they're just made up and pointless.

It's worth noting that in some sense, all words are just made up.

Yes, but made up as conventions between people who need a practical way of communicating something. If there is no such need, and the names are not practical for communication, it's more of an in-joke.

Somehow this reminds me of the Borges' tale "Funes the memorious". Being blessed or cursed with a prodigious and absolutely infallible memory, Funes invents his own numeration system which simply assigns to each number a different, arbitrary word from the dictionary. He claims that saying "Napoleon", for example, is way faster than "one thousand two hundred seventy six".

How were they made up? Who came up with these?

Apparently the invention and usage of ultra-specific collective nouns for animals (related to hunting) was fashionable in courts in the 14th and 15th century [1].

Most of the sources about collective nouns refer to the "Book of Saint Albans" as the origin of a large number of them [2]. But the book was meant to humorous, and includes collective nouns even for groups of people: "a superfluity of nuns", "a melody of harpers", "a doctrine of doctors", etc.

I imagine it was a fashionable court game to recite all the hilarious collective names for a vast number of animals and professions. Still, completely pointless from the point of view of communication.

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Saint_Albans

A whole group of ferrets scurrying around and shouting "business!" is how I picture the inside of every corporate office. — https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/7ub8l2/comment/d...

A great book on collective nouns is "An Exaltation of Larks" by James Lipton. It's hilarious and fascinating.

https://www.bookdepository.com/Exaltation-Larks-James-Lipton...

You may enjoy my favorite collective noun- a parliament of owls!

Group of crows = murder

Absolutely, ferrets are first rate company, and never a dull moment. Except, that is, when play abruptly stops because everybody momentarily goes to sleep.

At least in English, mustelids have inspired a good many verbs. You can weasel, you can badger, you can ferret. Unsurprising, really, once you get acquainted with their extremely personable nature.

> when play abruptly stops bedause everybody moentarily goes to sleep

Or they've all hatched a new plot and run off to hide... And then fell asleep there.

We had a brother and sister pair growing up.

What fun and funny creatures.

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