An entire caravan of camels is approaching

[venta]

I've occasionally wondered who originally had the job of making up collective nouns (largely because if there is a post of Collective-nounsmith to the Queen, I want it).

The conversation came up today at work, and reminded me to do a little googling. And I've found a short article, which interested me, so I thought I'd share it.

It seems that a fifteenth century treatise called The Book of St Albans is largely to blame. Disappointingly, this article doesn't use the subtitle found elsewhere: Treatyse Perteynynge to Hawkynge, Huntynge and Coote Armiris. Any book with that many Ys in the title is fine by me.

On the history of collective nouns.

If anyone knows where to find out more about which terms were ever used, and which were poetic fancies, I'd be intrigued. There are a couple of books on collective nouns on the market that I've seen, but they're mostly just lists rather than information on origins or usage.

Comments

[venta.livejournal.com]

Or a "spurious".

As far as I can tell, spurious = silly and invented recently. Silly and invented in the fifteenth century seems to guarantee you a tick.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Given it's a Wikipedia article, I suppose it's plausible that I could edit it and add comments to the effect that a lot of these words were never in common use anyway.

Eek. I've never interacted actively with Wikipedia. I assume there's an entiquette for this, and that it's FAQ'd or similar somewhere.

I was wondering about writing some entried for folky stuff over the holidays ("rapper" currently redirects to a list of "hip-hop musicians"), so maybe I should get reading up on the idea. Advice welcome.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Advice welcome.

Jump in, make mistakes, accept advice gratefully from those who offer it, but don't let someone abuse "seniority".

There's no harm at all in making any edit to any page. The worst that can happen (provided you don't seriously offend anyone or get caught up in an existing feud, e.g. by talking about whether a city should be referred to as "Gdansk" or "Danzig") is that someone will undo it by reverting to the previous version of the file. You can then have the discussion.

If anyone shouts "POV" at you, ask for further help.

[venta.livejournal.com]

POV = Point of View, ie subjective article ?

Having read the discussion attached to the list-of-collective-nouns page (as opposed to the collective-noun page), I'm scared already :)

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Correct. But POV is abused as a principle, with the result that sometimes quite commonplace beliefs end up having to be carefully hedged to achieve consensus ("consensus" is loosely defined as the point where the person who disagrees with you no longer automatically reverts all of your edits immediately on seeing them). It's not considered sporting to use qualifiers along the lines of "according to 99.9% of those who aren't complete morons..."

That discussion looks like it's been taken from the Votes for Deletion page. They've probably changed the mechanism by now, because it got a bit unwieldy, but the gist is that because pages can't be removed by users, there's a system for suggesting to the admins that a particular page or topic is so worthless as to deserve complete deletion. This tends to make people upset, but the most common reasons for deletion are legitimate and necessary: copyright violation (someone creates a new article by copy and paste) and self-promotion (someone writes an article about himself or his company in the hope of gaining fame and/or fortune).

Big fights on Wikipedia are quite rare compared with the number of articles, and as long as you are resolved not to get upset, they aren't too hard to deal with. Just don't edit the evolution page unless you're sure you want to.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Note to self: search for rapper sword (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapper_sword), not rapper. Brian's beaten me to it.

This is also a useful link for next time someone says "rapper ? You what ?"