So anyway. I’m at work, trying to do whatever it is I do there that makes them give me more money, and one of my fellow inmates asks me to settle an argument about what the proper term is for a group of rats. The only thing they could think of was “herd,” which didn’t sound right to them (“Look out! Someone’s spooked the herd while trying to rustle a few head o’ rat! STAMPEDE!”) , so they decided to get me to arbitrate based on the well-known fact that my skull is crammed with a lifetime of worthless trivia rather than actual knowledge. I was immediately able to offer up “plague” or “swarm” as possibilities, or “pack” as an alternative, depending on whether Dino and Sammy are involved.
But this got me to thinking: it seems as though history has seen fit to saddle most of the more popular animals with a highly specific group name. Some of these are well known (shoal of fish, pride of lions), some are descriptive (business of ferrets, raft of ducks), some historically obscure (dray of squirrels, bale of turtles), and some downright odd (smack of jellyfish?!). These collective nouns are referred to as “terms of venery.” Years ago I read an interesting little book on the topic, An Exaltation of Larks, which I highly recommend for the trivially inclined. The author is James Lipton–yes, the Inside the Actors’ Studio guy, although the book predates that phase of his career by many years, and I never made the connection until I looked the book up again online.
Why give every type of animal its own unique collective term, you may ask? Rest assured, our ancestors had very sound practical reasons for doing so, although I have no idea what any of those reasons were. Lipton would probably know. Presumably in days of yore, such terms had enormous survival value: for example, if you were on the night watch, walking the battlements of the castle, and one of the other guards cried out, “Hark! Yonder approaches a bunch of–” and then he suddenly died from the Black Plague or the Spanish Inquisition or something, you would have no idea whether he had been warning against an invasion of tigers or grapes. But if he managed to get the words out, “'Ware! 'Ware! 'Tis a hover of–” before he cacked, you would know that the castle was being attacked by trout.
It occurs to me that, with very few exceptions, mythological and fantastic creatures have not been accorded the same courtesy. The only notable example that I can think of offhand is Anne McCaffrey’s “Weyr of dragons,” and since that seemingly applies only to the dragons of Pern, it couldn’t hurt to have a few other such terms in use (“scourge of–?” “quest of–?”) The rest of the fantasy and science fiction bestiaries are no better off. How does one distinguish a group of trolls from a group of ogres? Is a family of hippogriffs considered a pride, a herd or a flock? What terms of venery would be appropriate for the many and diverse species found in Fantasy/SF? What about:
–a smithy of dwarves?
–a rossum of robots?
–an antiquity of elves?
–an exsanguination of vampires?
–an ululation of Wookies?
–a lunacy of lycanthropes?
–a cathedral of gargoyles?
–a shamble of zombies?
–a prophecy of centaurs?
–a spiegel of doppelgangers?
–a pandering of Ewoks?
–a holocaust of Balrogs?
–a subtlety of Istari?
–a harryhausen of living skeletons?
–a cower of Puppeteers?
–a pod of Body Snatchers?
–a macgonagall of Vogons?
–a seduction of succubi?
–a trident of merfolk?
–a magnitude of giants?
Ideas? Substitutions? Anyone know of other terms of venery for fictional creatures?
