What’s That Word?
I took advantage of my flexible schedule and worked at home today, which left me free to go to lunch with my dad. As we were coming out of the restaurant, we noticed a cloud of smallish, black-and-orange, monarch-looking butterflies in the parking lot. Following them, we discovered that they were busily colonizing some royal purple and lavendar flowers. Absolutely gorgeous. And as I stood there, I wondered “what is the collective noun for butterflies, anyway?” (As in, a colony of bats, a pod of whales, and a murder of crows.) Neither Dad nor I could think of an actual collective noun, but I thought that a flutter of butterflies would do nicely. This led us on to making up other collective nouns. We decided it’s a squad of geeks, but a snit of nerds. So, what other things need collective nouns? How about a ward of lawyers, or a waddle of penguins?
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October 2nd, 2003 at 4:16 pm
How about a Wind of lawyers?
October 17th, 2008 at 8:45 am
I’ve heard ‘gaggle of geeks’ often, though I think ‘network of geeks’ would be appropriate. A set (or simply a group… Abelian or not) of mathematicians. I googled ‘collective noun for physicists’ and got ‘grand unification of physicists’ which I rather like. But what about programmers? A library? (assuming they’re not all attending the same function) A framework? A repository?