Author Topic: Beastly Garden of Wordy Delights (Read 1563 times)

Noemon · « **on:** September 02, 2006, 10:00:50 AM »

Animal Plurals, Collective Nouns, Sounds, Gender and Offspring

Animal Adjectives (and some really, really lame jokes)

Porter · « **Reply #1 on:** September 02, 2006, 10:16:44 AM »

Why is English so convoluted when it comes to animals?

Jonathon · « **Reply #2 on:** September 02, 2006, 10:33:21 AM »

Well, the weird collective terms come from parlor games a couple hundred years ago, I believe. People would sit around and come up with words for "a group of [animal x]." But I'm not sure why the terms for males and females are so different so much of the time.

Porter · « **Reply #3 on:** September 02, 2006, 10:49:53 AM »

Why were their silly parlor game versions accepted by everybody else?

Jonathon · « **Reply #4 on:** September 02, 2006, 10:55:06 AM »

I don't know for sure, but I would guess there are two factors at work: first, people probably thought those terms were very clever, so they started using them in actual speech; second, people can be extremely gullible when it comes to language—tell them that the proper term for a group of ferrets is "business," and they'll likely believe you.

Noemon · « **Reply #5 on:** September 02, 2006, 10:58:01 AM »

I'm entertained by those plurals, but I don't really put much stock in them. The male/female and offspring information is interesting though, and the adjective chart is handy.

Tante Shvester · « **Reply #6 on:** September 02, 2006, 06:27:59 PM »

Quote

Why were their silly parlor game versions accepted by everybody else?

Most likely, they were the ones with the nicest parlours.

rivka · « **Reply #7 on:** September 07, 2006, 09:15:17 AM »

Quote

Well, the weird collective terms come from parlor games a couple hundred years ago, I believe. People would sit around and come up with words for "a group of [animal x]."

This so explains the invention of television.

Noemon · « **Reply #8 on:** September 07, 2006, 11:41:30 AM »