I have noticed in recent times that everything has become “a bunch” – a bunch of money, a bunch of ideas, a bunch of problems, a bunch of videos – even a bunch of people. In the main, the culprits seem to be Americans aged from teenagers to early middle age, but they are not the only nationality who seem to have stopped using collective nouns. This malaise has spread to other parts of the English speaking world.
Our common language is poorer for not using these venery terms, and begs the question: Are collective nouns taught in schools any more?
This article dips into the history of collective nouns and provides some entertaining examples of venery terms.
Unless you are a philologist, a student of medieval English etiquette (there must be Chair for such an obscure subject at an ancient English university), or a lexophile, without looking it up, you are unlikely to know what venery means in this context. In Middle English, venery meant hunting, and is derived from the Latin venari and the Old French venerie both of which mean ‘hunting’.1
What has hunting got to do with collective nouns? To answer that question, we have to go back to The Book of Saint Albans (originally The Boke of Seynt Albans), which was printed in 1486 and is attributed to Dame Julia Barnes, who is said to have been a Benedictine prioress of the Priory of St. Mary of Sopwell near St. Albans2 in Hertfordshire, England. The information in The Book of St Albans: Containing Treatises on Hawking, Hunting, Cote-Armour, Fishing, and Blasing of Arms, to give it its full title, served as a vocabulary guide for medieval gentlemen to help them use proper terminology during upper-class sports and dinner conversations – terminology that had existed long before the Book was written. It popularised 165 poetic and satirical collective nouns in a section called ‘The Compaynys of Beestys and Fowlys”.
If a medieval gentleman were to to go hunting, he needed to know whether the quarry he chased was a “flock” or a “skein” or a “herd” or a “sounder”. Should he “let fly a hawk” or “cast off” a falcon? He needed to know the names of the homes and lairs of various animals, what those animals looked like when they took flight, what their calls or songs sounded like, and the names of their young.3 The Book of St Albans provided him with this information.
I was taught collective nouns in primary school when I was about eight years old. Here are some examples of the collective nouns I recall being taught, many of which are from ‘The Compaynys of Beestys and Fowlys’:
A gaggle of geese – two or more geese that are not in flight
A skein of geese – geese in flight.
A bevy of girls
A rascal of boys
A drove of cows
A herd of deer
A murder of crows
A murmeration of starlings – one of nature’s great spectacles!
A parliament of owls
A constellation of stars
A stand of trees
A den of vipers (not to be confused with a “nest of vipers”, which is a figurative phrase that describes a group of dangerous, treacherous, or untrustworthy people).
A coven of witches
A bunch of grapes
A cluster of nuts
A fleet of ships
A swarm of bees
An army of ants
A hand of bananas (as you would buy them in a greengrocer’s shop)
A bunch of bananas (growing on the tree and comprising several hands)
A bunch of keys (on a keyring the collective noun is a ring of keys)
A barrel of monkeys
A pride of lions
a school of whales
The Compendium of Collective Nouns4 gives many more examples, some of which are familiar, such as a cache of ammunition. Others are less familiar, such as a kettle of buzzards, a hover of kestrels, or a mob of kangaroos.
Try these collective nouns:
A roll of coins
A wad of banknotes (banks often use the term ‘bundle’)
A cete of Badgers (a sett is where badgers live)
A mountain of problems
A train of (good) ideas
A miasma of bad ideas – I like a blunder of bad ideas
An ostentation of peacocks
A harem of peahens
A skirl of pipers
A skulk of thieves (in Nineteenth Century New England, the collective noun for thieves was a muzzle)
A dissimulation of birds
An unkindness of ravens
A host of sparrows
A circus of Puffins
A chime of wrens
A disputation of lawyers
A gaze of raccoons
An unction of undertakers
A charm of words
An amble of walkers
A congeries of wizards
Compared with these collective nouns and venery terms, using ‘a bunch’ as the collective noun for everything sounds so lame and deprives your writing and speech of colour and humour.
