Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjtheblunt | Hacker News Reader

It was caught a day ago and traveled to the rest of its “dazzle” in Montana.

This gives me a chance to bring up my favorite collective noun for a group of animals: a bloat of hippopotami. Although a "dazzle" of zebras comes a second close. One of my favorite quirks of English, don't think other languages have our penchant for giving animal groups special names.

Let's not forget a Murder of Crows.

Don't forget a wisdom of wombats.

i thought those collective words were (mostly) a recent invention? https://medium.com/@Naturalish/the-absurd-truth-behind-colle...

Yeah, nobody really uses 95% of those.

They are, sure, but they're really fun and some of them caught on. I think it's the exact kind of funny little thing we should encourage, language doesn't have to be serious.

Other languages also have this exact same quirk, like Spanish[1] or Portuguese[2].

[1] https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nombre_colectivo [2] https://pt.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantivo_coletivo

Wow, that is fascinating. I will have to use auto-translation but definitely saving these for an evening read, thank you.

In English, these are called terms of venery:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun#Terms_of_vener...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animal_names

Japanese has 3 counting particles for animals. The generic one is 匹 "hiki" (ippiki, ni-hiki, san-biki) for dogs, cats, insects, fish, etc. Larger animals like horses and elephants use 頭 "toh" meaning "heads". Birds and rabbits use 羽 "wa" which means "wings." There are various theories why rabbits get counted the same as birds, possibly because rabbit meat tastes like chicken.

Tangential, but let’s talk collective nouns of animals. I’ve encountered people who are happy to know what a collective of x, and their amusement about how well the noun fits an animal group.

It seems to be lost on the general population how deliberate word choice ends up being, and how certain people throughout time have tried to make some words happen. Mark Fraunfelder comes to mind around some Internet lingo. Some sticks, some doesn’t.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com