No, you're not super smart or knowledgeable for calling it a "murder" of crows or a "parliament" of owls. They're just flocks. Giving them a name that applies to such a small subsection of creatures requires an unnecessary amount of specificity and actually loses information in relating them to birds. I've seen all sorts of silly groups for zebras and otters, we need to stop inventing cute new terms and stick with herd/pack/flock etc.
The English aristocracy made them up precisely to lord over the peasants how they had more money and time to be learned. Pointless knowledge but knowledge only someone who had the luxury to go hunting would know.
Also Japanese has collective nouns too but they aren’t just for animals.
They have collective nouns for objects that usually depend on the shape of the object. Like there’s words for “pair” but a specific one for “pair” when talking about chopsticks. Some for round things others for stick like things. Other collective nouns are for large machinery or appliances or vehicles!
Thats not just a japanese thing, thats largely due to the sinosphere. Japan indiginously has a few of them, but most are due to the sinicization and influence of imperial china and chinese language across the historical sinosphere. Its called counters and is a chinese thing if anything, not japanese
This brings more variety and solidity to the language, ill have a lot more fun reading literature when its not written with plain and simple terms, istg this post borders with anti intelectualusm
you have trouble remembering too many different words or something? and wdym it loses information? it also doesn’t really matter because i’ve never heard a parliament of owls before, but if someone said that to me i’d just assume that it meant a group. words are just words.
also, the terms flock and heard could all just be simplified into “group” by your logic right? why don’t we just call everything a group of this or that? group of zebras group of crows. just for the purpose of making english boring. congratulations.
I really don’t like when people just hate ANYTHING with whimsy in a scientific field, because they’re all supposed to not make jokes, am I right? Also, nobody’s stopping you from using flock.
As long as it’s implied that you’re referring to a group of animals, you can call it whatever you want. Depending on the people you’re talking to, it can be informative too. I use “raft” for birds on the water and “kettle” for circling soaring birds all the time as a birdwatcher. It gives extra context for the group they’re in, especially if I’m with someone else who’s trying to see what I’m looking at.
Huddle, smattering, congregation, murmuration, cloud, all give different ideas of how a group is composed. Sure the collective nouns can be bullshit but I find that many can be quite useful.
They aren't invited not recently anyway they most if not all are from hunting manuals from the 1500. I get people being interested but objectively you are wrong its part of the English language, and a flock is for birds in general which you could say and most still do its just a facilitating part of our language people like
I feel like you're complaining about nothing here honestly... Like yeah it's silly but like we have a bunch of other silly terminology for animals so why does this one matter?
So to everyone saying that it's hating "fun" or "whimsy", these terms apparently come from Victorian era bourgeois hunting parties. As in, rich assholes murdering these animals for fun came up with all these terms.
You're so right we should stop classifying things, like what's even the point, I mean one animal another animal what's really the difference we're all just meat sacks at the end of the day, I say we go back to randomly calling things whatever the hell we feel like, you weird minimally haired creature
So you think humans aren’t allowed to have fun? Brother, calling it a murder of crows is fun, it feels spooky. Should we just limit every single part of our lives to serious names and boring definitions? No wonder you spend your time making reddit posts about hating fun stuff.
these were invented a long time ago friend, lol. not recently. you are mad at 1486 folks (looked up when murder of crows was first used). You know, the ye old middle ages folks you mad at right now lol.
Almost all of these were completely and randomly made up by a single group of what is basically frat boys from 1300, forgotten for 500 years, and then resurfaced in the mid 1800s as trivia when people discovered the old book those dudes wrote it down in. Stop using them.
I just love saying murder of crows. Like look at this bunch of little inky birds murdering around. It just sounds fun. I wouldn't, however, intend on anyone saying that over just "a flock" bc that is needless, pretentious and annoying. I just love to be able to call it a murder of crows
Using beautiful, hyper-specific words in precisely the right way for poetic effect is one of the greatest joys of the English language. You have probably the largest vocabulary of any extant language, use it for goodness' sake! Bruh I swear some of y'all native speakers don't even deserve the King's English, no cap.
It was actually pretty much just one guy that invented most of them, writing a book on how to be proper and posh as a British socialite back in the day. There was a newfound interest in them only just recently.
but murder is the actual term for a group of crows, and so is parliament for owls… it’s the proper noun, why is it bad now to use correct terminology 😭
I feel like you’re acting like they just made them up yesterday. These are literally just part of the language we speak. You kind of have to get over it
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u/crustboi93 13d ago
Think they're just nouns, not pronouns