A brief snippet, by Jack Whyte (author of the Dream Of Eagles novels):
LE MOT JUST…
We were arguing one evening, as the sun was going down,
About the names we give to groups: The old Collective Noun.
We had gone through prides of lions; schools of fish; brigades of foot,
When I wondered, “What’s collective for the poor old prostitute?”
Well! I felt as though I’d stepped upon a hidden hornets’ nest,
For each man proposed an answer, and each swore his was the best!
We’d a treasury of trollops, and a tragedy of trulls;
An entire Who’s Who of hookers and a calamity of culls…
We’d a pastry cook among us who, in tribute to his arts,
Put forth the obvious image of a tempting tray of tarts,
While a fishmonger there present, who was more than slightly nuts,
Proposed the odious and malodorous catchphrase “a slab of sluts!”
Then our resident militiaman cried out “A troop of tramps!”
But he was shouted down in favour of a vile vendue of vamps;
A convention of solicitors; a haggling horde of whores;
Such invention for the ladies whom society deplores!
No, the task of giving pride of place was not a simple one.
The concubinage of courtesans might easily have won,
Or the hostile hiss of hustlers, but we had to share the rose
Between a bright fanfare of strumpets and an anthology of pros…
Well, I concede that there is some room for misinterpretation. I admit to cribbing the usage shamelessly from the aforementioned James Lipton book, An Exaltation of Larks, which is subtitled, Or, the Venereal Game. He may not have been entirely serious with this usage, either. I try to be magnanimous about being corrected in these matters, so I thank both you and picunurse for calling this matter to my attention, and I hope that no one is unduly troubled by the conflation of the phrase “venereal terms” with a mental image of James Lipton. That’s an issue that must be wrestled with separately.
Actually, I was referring to Avalonian Grendels, as presented by Niven in The Legacy of Heorot. Said beasts don’t prominently get dismembered, but they do rampage quite prominently.
I agree with you about a name for a half-dozen Pak, however, I suspect that an Internecine of Pak would be a better term for a group of them. While they can, and do, work together, it’s usually only until there is a definite advantage to their genetic group to betray their allies.
