BrainStuff Classics: Why a Gaggle of Geese? Where Do Collective Nouns Come From?

About 500 years ago, creating clever collective nouns for groups of animals, objects, and people was trendy, and some of those nouns of assemblage stuck. Learn the history of this quirk of the English language in today's classic episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/shrewdness-apes-collective-nouns-500-year-old-language-fad.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey brain Stuff,
Lauren vogel Bomb here with a classic episode of the podcast.
In this one, we get into the weird and wonderful
grammatical world of how groups of animals got their names.
The basic answer is that before people had Netflix, they

(00:21):
had to make their own fun Hey brain Stuff, Lauren
vogel Bomb here. Have you ever heard of a group
of ferrets called a business of ferrets? Or a collection
of jellyfish referred to as a smack of jellyfish? What
about a shrewdness of apes? We use collective nouns, also
known as nouns of assemblage, to describe all sorts of groups.

(00:42):
Hosts of angels, bands of men, and shocks of corn
are commonly heard these days, but the nouns associated with
particular groupings of animals can get weird fast because words
and their uses are invented by people. When we see
a bunch of a specific construction, you can bet on
it being the result of a language fad, and sure enough,
five hundred years ago, nouns of assemblage were all the rage.

(01:06):
We spoke via email with Magdalen Jacobs, a pH d.
Candidate in the Vanderbilt University Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences.
She said these are generally terms that came about from
upper class hunting culture in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
They're called terms of venery, and they're linked to Norman
culture and influence and the idea of proper hunting language.

(01:27):
Over one hundred and sixty terms of venery are listed
in the Book of Saint Albans, a wildly popular at
the time manner's guide published in fourteen eighty six that
coached the medieval gentleman through having conversations about hunting, falconry, fishing, sports,
and heraldry without embarrassing himself at dinner parties. These collective
nouns are found in a chapter entitled the Companies of

(01:48):
Beasts and Fowls, though some of the terms referred to
people rather than animals. A bit of a joke, the
Book of Saint Albans not only described a sleuth of
bears and a skulk of foxes, but also linked women
to geese in the collective consciousness by labeling collections of
both gaggles. According to Jacobs, this is partially because there
is a direct linguistic link from the word gaggle to

(02:10):
the Middle English word for cackle. A collection of wives
was labeled an impatience. A group of writers, on the
other hand, was called a worship. If language tells us
how to think about the world, we can see the
fifteenth century European gentlemen's social priorities. Though, of course, because
you can't keep the kids from making up slang. Once
the construction was introduced in the Book of Saint Albans,

(02:33):
people started coining their own nouns of assemblage. Although a
lot of these terms slipped into obscurity in the sixteenth century,
like much of the lingo we generate on a continual basis,
some of them were adopted into common speech. These days.
We don't often have occasion to talk about a sneer
of butlers or a misbelief of portrait painters, But whoever
came up with a staff of employees, a congregation of churchgoers,

(02:56):
or a panel of judges should congratulate themselves on a
job welled. Linguistically speaking, much of the time, the correct
term for a group of anything lets us know our
collective views on the disposition of whatever we're naming. Some
of the most evocative terms of venery can be found
in birds. The Book of Saint Albans lists an unkindness
of ravens and a murder of crows definitely creepy negatives,

(03:20):
but a charm of finches adorable. Whoever first referred to
a college of cardinals was probably suggesting they thought the
group of little red birds looked like a meeting of academics.
But why a group of storks is called a mustering
is a little less clear. C. S. Lewis coined the
term parliament of owls in his children's book series The
Chronicles of Narnia, a nod to Chaucer's poem A Parliament

(03:42):
of Fowls. The term is now recognized in dictionaries as
being the correct term for a group of owls. There are, meanwhile,
few nouns of assemblage for insects mentioned in the Book
of Saint Albans. We still refer to a swarm of bees,
which was recorded in the book, but we don't talk
as much about a business of flies or a flock
of lice. If you've ever heard of a kindle of kittens,

(04:04):
that comes from the Middle English word kindolin, which meant
to give birth or produce a litter, which was originally
used only for puppies, but is now commonly used for
all kinds of baby animals. A group of adult cats
might be a glaring or a pounce, but a crowd
of feral cats is a destruction. Anyone concerned about the
decline of migrating songbirds can understand why that might be. Dogs,

(04:26):
which were as much a man's best friend in the
Middle Ages as today, got a lot of play in
the Book of Saint Albans. Hunting hounds alone got several
group titles, a cry, a mute, a pack, and a kennel.
Some of the most inventive terms of venery are applied
to wild animals, Jacob said, because they began as hunting terms.
The original names from the Book of Saint Albans reflected

(04:48):
a specific societal disposition towards the animal being hunted. A
pride of lions is a good example. Others that came later,
such as a wisdom of wombats, may be inaccurate, as
wombats are rather solitary and don't spend time in groups.
Others likely referred to qualities of the animals themselves. A
business of ferrets came from a busyness of ferrets, which

(05:10):
makes more sense than business if you've spent any time
at all watching ferrets. These days, folks continue to make
up new nouns of assemblage and bring back old ones.
Thus we can talk about a prickle of hedgehogs, an
obstinacy of buffalo, a bloat of hippos, and a gam
of whales, regardless of whether we're planning on hunting them
or not. Today's episode is based on the article a

(05:36):
shrewdness of apes. Collective nouns are a five hundred year
old language fad on HowStuffWorks dot Com, written by Jesslinshields.
Brains Stuff is production of ByHeart Radio in partnership with
how Stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang.
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