If you haven't guessed as much from reading my Word Woman posts, I have an on-going love affair with language. Words are my passion, etymology is my raison d'etre and vocabulary is a way of life for me. That being the case, I'd like to share with you one of my favorite underrated parts of speech: The collective noun. Collective nouns are words that describe a group of things, whether they be birds, plants, animals, people or what have you. Their tendency to be both amusing and aptly descriptive of the nouns they modify has often led me to wonder about the sort of person who sits around making them up. So, for your edification, here is just a small sample of the collective nouns common to the English language:
A pod of assassins
A rainbow of butterflies
A glaring of cats
A drunken ship of cobblers
A turandot of finches
A giggle of girls
A cruft of hackers
A cavalcade of horsemen
A multiply of husbands
A vagary of impediments
| A neverthriving of jugglers |
A qwerty of keyboards
An atlas of maps
A chapter of pages
A slither of snakes
Collective nouns are fun, colorful words to slip into everyday speech, so go ahead and astonish your friends and family with the wealth of words you have at your disposal by using one today!
No comments:
Post a Comment