Arts: A Crowd-Sourced Lab for Collective Nouns

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Brow Beat Follow Friday: A Crowd-Sourced Lab for Collective Nouns By Katy Waldman Posted Friday, Mar 23, 2012, at 07:24 PM ET Collective nouns are the free radicals of the English language. Funny, lyrical, and bizarre ones pop up like mushrooms (like a troop of mushrooms), sometimes in the broad daylight of the New York Times. Among my colleagues here at Slate, Melonyce McAfee is particularly fond of a "murder of crows," Josh Levin has a soft spot for a "school of fish," Jeremy Stahl prefers a "gaggle of geese," and Anna Weaver loves a "passel of pigs." A twitter feed consisting solely of neat collective nouns should be wildly popular, right? Though the hashtag #collectivenouns is alive and well, the delightful Twitter account @collectivenouns, which compiles CNs "that may or may not have found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary," has lain dormant since December 12. @Collectivenouns is the twitter feed of the UK-based website All Sorts; by appending #collectivenouns to a tweet, you can suggest any noun X for a group of Ys, and the site will keep track of your recommendation. @Collectivenouns used to retweet the best of these, from the timely (a "kettle of protestors") to the ageless (an "objection of prudes"). But now—life is hard, I know—you have to keep refreshing a #collectivenouns search if you crave quirky phrases to weave into your everyday conversation. So I have decided to harness the power of Follow Friday to do some good in the world. Though All Sorts has already given us a treasure trove of CNs (the Semite in me loves both a "feh of ... To continue reading, click here. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Bazelon: What if Trayvon Martin Was the One Acting in Self-Defense? Why It's So Easy for Hackers to Steal Financial Information From Restaurants Roiphe: The Marketing for The Hunger Games Is as Ruthless as the Hunger Games Themselves	Advertisement
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