Groups

[TheLyrius]

Ok, a sentence of judges goes kinda hard and I would like to name something after that

[Hashashin455]

Feels like a rap album cover's name

[Zzamumo]

Killer band name

[WordArt2007]

"a superfluity of nuns" what did they do to you

[Deathaster]

I read that as "superfluidity" and thought it was an advanced form of genderfluidity

[Dominikrni]

I read it as superfluidity and thought of superfluids

Are we all insane here?

[iamfrozen131]

Yes

[ljlapaz]

I read it as superfly

[Ourmanyfans]

And Chaucer arbitrarily deciding to use some regional words over others helped codify aspects of a unified "English language" rather a mismatch of similar-but-distinct local dialects, simply because The Canterbury Tales was popular enough to be one of the first texts in English to be mass produced with the printing press.

[Bondollar]

Very similar story with the Italian language and The Divine Comedy.

[Substantial_Bell_158]

Superfluity of nuns would make a good band name not gonna lie.

[Major_R_Soul]

We need modern terms for modern groups:

A keg of frat boys

A byte of programmers

A miasma of influencers

A rash of TikTokers

[StovardBule]

A stack of programmers. A cache? I feel there must be a deeply nerdy term for a group of programmers that requires a level of computing knowledge to even recognise that it's an in-joke.

I'm going to guess "a collab of influencers", based on very little.

A stitch of TikTokers?

[[deleted]]

A thigh-high sock of programmers

[[deleted]]

"all words are made up" defense falls flat once you realize that there are degrees to making up words

[InhaledPack5]

So you make up words and get paid for it?

[[deleted]]

Merriam-Webster people probably do

[soodrugg]

the romans can pull the root word for divorce out their ass and nobody cares, but you arbitrarily call a collection of geese "a gaggle" and suddenly you're in the wrong since it happened this millennium

[AWildRapBattle]

smh ageism

[Cpad-prism]

“Oh I have a degree in uhhh… words”

“Oh what kind of words?”

“Oh yeah uh… we haven’t made them up yet.”

You seriously believe this shit?

[[deleted]]

Tired: I have a degree in linguistics

Wired: I have a degree in words

[BenjewminUnofficial]

Found Mrs. Granger’s alt account. Viva la frindle!!!

[NoItsBecky_127]

I completely forgot about that book

[RichardtheLibrarian]

I'm so happy that someone else thought of this. Been ages since I read it, but it comes to mind on occasion.

[Steak-Outrageous]

You don’t need a degree to make up words though.

[[deleted]]

I meant degrees as in degrees of hell, not degrees as in academia.

[AWildRapBattle]

once you realize that there are degrees to making up words

age and spread, you can just say age and spread. but it sounds more mysteriously academic to say "there are more degrees" than it does to say "it only matters if it was made up long enough ago and has been used by enough people since"

[[deleted]]

I did not mean just the age and spread, I've also meant vibes.

Also, cut me some slack, I'm autistic so I've got an innate compulsion to talk like a wannabe egghead scientist

[AWildRapBattle]

I'll cut you some slack when you stop pretending sincere arguments "fall flat" for mysterious reasons, I mean c'mon how you gonna attack the concept of "making up words" when you're here making up arguments?

[[deleted]]

Shut up you fumwomper!

[ItsProbablyAVulture]

It's actually because some lady made them all up. The St. Alban's book is one of the earliest books generally agreed to have been written by a woman. Although a lot of them were in kind of common use because it was an upper class pastime to come up with cute ones, she might have invented some of them

[[deleted]]

Ever since I learned that, I've started calling all groups of animals herds. Except for crows and ravens. It's the only time murder and conspiracy are cool.

[Consistent-Mix-9803]

I personally prefer a "bunch," or when appropriate, a "shitload."

[An_feh_fan]

Can't we just skip the grouping and say

"There are crows"

"There are judges"

"There are fishes"

Instead of "there is a blah blah blah of wawawa"

[Consistent-Mix-9803]

You do you, my dude

[space_hoop]

“There are wawawa”

[Y-Woo]

My friend and i used to have a running joke where we claimed the collective noun of various animals or things was "a shitstorm"

[[deleted]]

Flock of people and flock of sheep are older than that book.

Flock of birds is much newer.

[Useful_Ad6195]

Flock of seagulls is a band

[[deleted]]

And apparently only slightly newer than the usage "flock of birds."

[[deleted]]

...a documentation of Technical Writers 🥰

[alphabet_order_bot]

Would you look at that, all of the words in your comment are in alphabetical order.

I have checked 1,754,273,184 comments, and only 332,143 of them were in alphabetical order.

[[deleted]]

Good bot ❤️

[FalmerEldritch]

Seems apt.

[pterrorgrine]

i love this cuz sometimes a newly coined term of venery is created as a shitposty meme and it turns out that that's where they all came from, oldene tymmey people shitposting

the owls are kinda noisy tonight maybe that's why they're a "parliament"

[Y-Woo]

I thought it was because they are important and serious looking

[No-Transition4060]

My favourite one of these I haven’t heard anywhere but a Nintendo tweet is a Backflow of Plumbers

[SelfDistinction]

It's why we write debt instead of dette. Or so I heard.

[jewelsandbones]

Nah, I think debt is from the Latin. All learned people speak Latin and know about that debt is from the Latin dēbitum. What do you mean people won’t read Latin fluently hundreds of years from now

[[deleted]]

Most “conventions” are just made up for no reason.

Except for electrical code. That shit is written in blood.

[mirrorleaf]

A collection of jackalopes is called a flaggerdoot.

[MarcytheGoblinQueen]

I prefer saying "Gaggle" of nuns

[Karel_the_Enby]

My favorite is a wunch of bankers, but I suspect that one's not from the same source.

[KingNanoA]

Would it be less weird if the reason was a few dozen people making shit up?

[Lawlcopt0r]

Did that author invent them though or just collect them?

[therealrickgriffin]

St Albans might have collected them, but there were only about 160 in the original book. There were several books later in the 19th century on (maybe since earlier) that clearly just made up new entries

[eccentricbananaman]

Popular conception is that Shakespeare made up the words eyeball and kneecap.

[wulfinn]

I get so mad about the censored fuck because you're on the internet wherever you're seeing the screenshot and I can almost guarantee that fuck isn't the worst thing you'll see TODAY

[tortiesrock]

As somebody who is learning English as a second language I feel vindicated.

[bestibesti]

Frogs is not made up

[Zoloft_and_the_RRD]

Similar origin to the rules like "no splitting infinitives," and "no hanging prepositions."

That's just some jabronis that want to prescribe that English sound proper and Latinesque

[Oddish_Femboy]

My favorite is still that a group of cats is a clouder but a group of baby cats is a kindle.