Was listening, the other day, to an odd little song by Harrison & Clapton:
Thinkin' 'bout the times you drove in my car.
Thinkin' that I might have drove you too far.
And I'm thinkin' 'bout the love that you laid on my table.
I told you not to wander 'round in the dark.
I told you 'bout the swans, that they live in the park.
Then I told you 'bout our kid: now he's married to Mabel.
These lyrics are deeply troubling. For example, why did she need to know where swans lived? Was she unaware of their affinity for water? Are they linked to the apparent danger in the dark? (Perhaps she would have been mugged by swans?) And why does does "Mabel" get a name, while "our kid" doesn't even get a gender reference? It's as if they're both much more familiar with this "Mabel" chick than their own offspring.
To make things weirder, the song happens to be named "Badge". There are no badges in the song. Not even a clear reference to law enforcement. This is why, despite the fact that I'm fairly good at writing music (or used to be, anyway) I'd never be a lyricist. I could never write the stuff above with a straight face. Much less try naming it "Badge." Might as well be "Grapefruit" or "Pencil."
(Wikipedia says (mostly) that it was a misreading of "Bridge", written badly or upside-down.)
All this brings me to a very, very important question:
How in the world did we end up naming human offspring the same word we apply to small goats? It's almost as if we decided to nickname our children "lambs" or "calves" for short. And it doesn't end there: we also call an older female goat a "nanny." Again, ever heard of a "nanny sheep"? Or ever hear people call their wife a "ewe" (except as a pun)?
What disturbing historical event led to this unusual human/goat naming affinity?
And, since we're (well, "I'm", actually) discussing animal names, why on earth did we need to devote so much of our vocabulary to naming animals? We have a different name, per species, for the adult male animal, the adult female animal, the immature animal, and sometimes a few extra names thrown in between, just to make things more interesting. Not to mention plurals...
For example, the plural of "ferret" is ... "business." I kid you not. (Ahem.) A group of puppies is a "litter." A baby Alpaca is called a "cria." A group of apes is called a "shrewdness". (Again, not kidding. If your "business" has "shrewdness" does that mean you have both ferrets and apes working there?) And a group of boars is — you're never going to believe this — a singular.
Yes, you read that right. Some idjit decided to name a group of boar a "singular." Was this some elaborate joke among boar hunters? "Hey Bob! How many boar are hiding in the bush there?" "Oh, just a singular boar!" (Snicker.)
The madness doesn't end there:
A bale of turtles
A bed of clams or oysters
A bevy or wedge (flying) of swans
A gam, school or pod of whales
A gaggle of geese (on the ground)
A herd or pod of seals
A hover of trout
A knot of toads
A paddling of ducks (in the water
A school of porpoises (or fish in general)
A siege of herring
A shoal of bass (or most fish species)
A skein of geese (in flight)
A smack of jellyfish
A team of ducks (in flight) [link]
Yes, again, that's right. You can't figure out what to call a flying flock of birds until you're sure what they are. "Look at that, what is, it ... wedge? skein? bevy? team?... of birds flying over there!" And a "seige" of herring gives fresh meaning to the Monty Python Fish Slapping Dance.
And if group names weren't enough, we have to rename many animals over and over depending on their gender and stage of life:
A female sheep is called a ewe. Yoe is a slang term for ewe. A young female is called a ewe lamb. The process of giving birth to lambs is called lambing. Another word for birthing is parturition.
A male sheep is called a ram. Buck is the slang term for ram. A young male is called a ram lamb. In parts of the United Kingdom, a ram is called a tup and the mating season is called tupping.
A yearling is an animal between 1 and 2 years of age that may or may not have produced offspring. In other countries, a yearling ewe is called a hogget, shearling, gimmer, theave, or teg. [link]
Oh, no. We can't just say "mating season." No, if it's a sheep, "tupping" it is. What is it if it's elk? Oh yes, it's "rutting." And "ewe" needs its own slang term? And we need another term for giving birth?
Ever get the feeling this is all an elaborate joke perpetrated by ancient Englishmen — gentry surely — who had nothing better to do with their lives than make up bizarre plural names for things? And do other languages inflict these sorts of pointless nuances on their speakers?
a ram is called a tup and the mating season is called tupping.
In Yiddish, the human mating season is called "Schtupping." Maybe that's a hint to the origins?
I've heard that some of the differences between the names of meat and the animal that it comes from is caused by one group of people raising the animal and another eating it. I've had trouble verifying this.
It should be noted that [Robert] Burchfield, in The English Language, calls this distinction between field names and food names "an enduring myth" on the grounds that the French terms were using for living animals as well (he cites Samuel Johnson referring to a cow as "a beef"), but even so I think the statement above is a reasonable generalization.
For what it's worth, German makes no field/food distinction: the neuter singular for cattle is Rind, beef is Rindfleisch; pork is Schwein and pork is Schweinefleisch. I'd say the same is true of Spanish but things aren't quite so clear-cut. Carne means meat generically, but is usually understood to mean beef. If you want to specify beef, you say carne de res, res simply meaning beast or animal. A cow is vaca. Oddly enough, rosbif (roast beef) and bistec (beefsteak) derive from English--although bistec often just refers to the cut, and I have seen restaurants offering bistec de puerco. Puerco can mean either pig or pork, but pigs are often called cerdo and cochino. Cordero means lamb in both senses, and ternera means both calf and veal. straight dope
In Chinese, things are simpler. The meat of an animal is just "name of the animal" + "Word for meat." I don't know about groups.
It seems that a lot of the 'group names' for animals have fallen out of use in modern times where interacting with animals is much less a part of our lives, except for those still involved in some kind of industry or intensive study. I mean, sure, a flock of crows is called a 'murder.' But I've never once heard someone mention the fact without first saying something like "did you know that..." It is interesting how much terrain is involved in naming (flying, walking, swimming, resting)
But yeah, it's interesting how language is sometimes used to separate ingroups from outgroups. Friends have told me that Latin is difficult because its proper use showed who was a 'true Roman.'
I'm limited on time, but some excerpts from a discussion on the snopes message board on this topic (no chance to fact check, sorry);
“A ‘murder’ of crows is based on the persistent but fallacious folk tale that crows form tribunals to judge and punish the bad behavior of a member of the flock. If the verdict goes against the defendant, that bird is killed (murdered) by the flock. The basis in fact is probably that occasionally crows will kill a dying crow who doesn’t belong in their territory or much more commonly feed on carcasses of dead crows. Also, both crows and ravens are associated with battlefields, medieval hospitals, execution sites and cemeteries (because they scavenged on human remains). In England, a tombstone is sometimes called a ravenstone.”
http://www.ascaronline.org/crowfaq.html
...
Most of those known today are due to a book by James "Actors Studio" Lipton called "An Exhaltation of Larks."
While Lipton did find his entries in older sources, he did not differentiate between those recorded once as a nonce term, those that were slang that quickly became passe, and those in actual use. Many of the collective nouns we know never had any common usage until his book popularized them. It was as if I coined the term, "A snope of urban legends" and, years later, someone finds this post and claimed it was a term in common use.
Thus, "a murder of crows" might have been a standard term, or it might have appeared in a single record in an obscure document from the 1500s. To ask if people actually used the term regularly before Lipton requires some rather serious research.
One of many alleged group names found in late Middle English glossarial sources. App. revived in the 20th cent.
Note: alleged. The OED gives three examples from 1475-1478 (none of which is precisely "murder"):
quote:a1475 MS Porkington 10 in Trans. Philol. Soc. (1909) 53 A morther of crowys. c1475 MS Egerton 1995 f. 56, A Mursher of Crowys. ?1478 CAXTON Lydgate's Horse, Goose & Sheep (1822) 30 A murther of crowes.
{snip}
Then, the term vanishes until 1939.
"Parliament of rooks" is traced to Chaucer, though he used "Parliament of birds" (when converted to 20th century spelling), indicating that they were noisy. "Parliament" meant any kind of noisy gathering, and the first actual cite of "Parliament of rooks" in the OED is from 1905.
The best that can be said of these lists without research is that the terms might have been used by at least one person at some time.
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"Morther" has been established as having the definition of murder. It was used in The Vision of Piers Plowman (1377 - 1379) "And whoso morthereth a good man" and in 1450 there is a reference to "morthering þe kinggis peple" in a Petition of the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight. I could find no references to "mursher", except by other folks online talking about Crows.
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The more esoteric names (crash, scurry, pounce, skulk, etc.) are often describing groupings of solitary animals that are very rarely or never actually in groups (rhinos, squirrels, cats, foxes, etc.)
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Just to be a bit nit-picky, it was actually the Parlement of Foulys or, in Modern English, "The Parliament of Fowles". Foulys was pronounced "fools", so a parliament (or congress or house of representatives) is an appropriate description, at times. [Razz]
I guess we still use something similar to sort the Nigerian spammers into their own e-mail bucket. :-)
Very true. :-)
“Ever get the feeling this is all an elaborate joke perpetrated by ancient Englishmen — gentry surely — who had nothing better to do with their lives than make up bizarre plural names for things?”
Constantly. But then again, I fell sentiments like that about English all the time.
And, just to really hurt your head:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Collective_nouns
And looking further:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_noun
So it WAS them (according to Wikipedia)… The English nobility of that era were so good at screwing up so much…
Posted by: on April 3, 2010 12:03 PM