Collective nouns

[Miss Chicken]

That is because English has borrowed from so many different languages and when a word was borrowed the previous word being used was not always discarded but often kept (and often took on a slightly different meaning from the new word).

For example - gaze, goggle, peer are three different ways of staring.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Yet German has useful words which we English have to borrow, such as Schadenfreude and Gemütlichkeit.

A congress of baboons seems appropriate with the shut down -- perhaps best left for TNZ.

 

[trekkiedane]

I think there should be specialised term for a collection of odd socks - suggestions, please.

A washing of socks.

A dimension of socks -the socks you have.
An alternative dimension of socks -the socks you're missing.
^Those two are together known as an entanglement of socks.

Just thinking out loud here.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

A disparity of socks.

 

[Gov Kodos]

 

[trekkiedane]

Yet German has useful words which we English have to borrow, such as Schadenfreude and Gemütlichkeit.

And not forgetting Fahrvergnügen

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Vorsprung durch Technik

 

[Miss Chicken]

I think there should be specialised term for a collection of odd socks - suggestions, please.

A washing of socks.

A dimension of socks -the socks you have.
An alternative dimension of socks -the socks you're missing.
^Those two are together known as an entanglement of socks.

Just thinking out loud here.

If you are on Twitter you can Tweet your suggestions at

https://twitter.com/collectivenouns

They have a website giving thousands of suggestions for possible collective names here

For example, for freckles they have received the suggestions

a galaxy of freckles
a decoupage of freckles

 

[trekkiedane]

I don't tweet (what's the collective noun for twittering people? -a bunch of twats?) -but any one should feel free to put those suggestions on there.

Vorsprung durch Technik

Aus Erfahrung Gut...

 

[lurok]

Not forgetting the sublime gesamtkunstwerk

I thought it was a congress of baboons.

Isn't it a troop? Or is that just for smaller monkeys, like Macaques?

I certainly don't use a Parliament of Owls, Murder of Crows, etc. But I try to remember them for trivia purposes.

I do use herd, pack, flock, bunch, pod, and pride (although, for pack and pride, it literally has to be a unified group, not just a bunch of them together).

ETA: I see that's how the Baboon discussion started, making my post superfluous.

Or as Rich Hall responded when asked the baboon question on QI:

The Pentagon

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I don't tweet (what's the collective noun for twittering people? -a bunch of twats?) -but any one should feel free to put those suggestions on there.

Vorsprung durch Technik

Aus Erfahrung Gut...

Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal
Die Sonne scheint mit Glitzerstrahl

 

[thestrangequark]

I think there should be specialised term for a collection of odd socks - suggestions, please.

A washing of socks.

A dimension of socks -the socks you have.
An alternative dimension of socks -the socks you're missing.
^Those two are together known as an entanglement of socks.

Just thinking out loud here.

Beautiful.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

What, no Seagulls jokes yet? I'm shocked, I tell you.

Vor uns liegt ein weites Tal
Die Sonne scheint mit Glitzerstrahl

Die Fahrbahn ist ein graues Band
Weisse Streifen, gruener Rand

 

[trekkiedane]

^And that, is why the German Autobahn is such a horror to drive: nothing to look at!

 

[B.J.]

In college marching band, we called ourselves the Bass Drum Collective, so I guess you could say "a collective of bass drummers". If you're familiar at all with how a marching bass line works, you know that you pretty much have to share a brain with everyone else in the line to play the music right, like the Borg.

 

[rhubarbodendron]

^And that, is why the German Autobahn is such a horror to drive: nothing to look at!

I beg to differ. We have potholes galore! (which you are wise to look at - at least if you value your axles)

Would an assembly of potholes be a whole pot of potholes?

As for the socks: if they are hand-knitted they'd be a mesh of socks. Or a worldwide web.
And as far as the problem of disappearing socks is concerned: that has a simple physical reason: Washing machines nowadays spin extremely fast. This creates a tiny black hole in the middle of each drum which is just big enough to swallow one sock at a time after which it collapses. As we all know some matter escapes from the average black hole in a jet stream and indeed occasionally socks have been found within the back of washing machines' casings, exactly where a jet stream were to be expected to exit.

 

[trekkiedane]

^And that, is why the German Autobahn is such a horror to drive: nothing to look at!

I beg to differ. We have potholes galore! (which you are wise to look at - at least if you value your axles)

As a non-driver myself, I wouldn't notice those (until it's too late anyway) but, also as a non-driver, I LOVE the Nachtbaustellen, it's like a disco on the road: flashing and blinking lights of all colours, hot guys in boots, shorts and fluorescents sweating away to the thump-thump-thump-rythm of heavy machinery, everyone being squeezed into much less space than outside... well, maybe it's most like a gay disco...

 

[MacLeod]

According to wiki, "The tradition of using "terms of venery" or "nouns of assembly"—collective nouns that are specific to certain kinds of animals—stems from an English hunting tradition of the Late Middle Ages."

Yes, I noted that. To come up with some of those collective terms, those medieval English hunters must have been joking. Or drunk.

Or more likely both.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

^And that, is why the German Autobahn is such a horror to drive: nothing to look at!

But great fun to sing about.

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DO-Ddqbqgs[/yt]

 

[MacLeod]

I found a rather long list of English collective nouns: http://www.rinkworks.com/words/collective.shtml

In German, we do have a few but not remotely as many. While ours root in hunting language as well, hunting was never such a popular occupation here as it used to be (and still is) in Britain. I assume that is the reason why we have so few collective nouns.

It seems to me that threre is a general trend in English to be a language with a huge vocabulary. There appears to be a word for every single shade of a meaning. It often drives me into despair when looking up a word: for every German noun, verb or adjective there are 10 to 20 meanings in English.

Example:
German : starren
English: gape, gaze, goggle, peer, scowl, stare at so/sth, stare into space...

That is because English has borrowed from so many different languages and when a word was borrowed the previous word being used was not always discarded but often kept (and often took on a slightly different meaning from the new word).

For example - gaze, goggle, peer are three different ways of staring.

True, i.e.

She gazed longingly at him, He peered through the key hole. Has a sublty different meaning than he peeped through the keyhole.

Scowl of course is a negative word. So you can't just interchange gaze for scowl. It all comes down to the context that you want to convey that determines which word is actually better to use. English