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

[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.