I was given a rather lovely book for Christmas by my parents called "An Unkindness of Ravens - A Book of Collective Nouns" by Chloe Rhodes.
This rather excellent lady has obviously done some serious research, and has come up with some wonderful backstories to some great collective nouns.
For example, most people have heard of 'an unkindness of ravens' or even 'a parliament of owls, but had you heard of a 'siege' of herons, or 'fling' of dunlins? It's a great read, and one that I'm sure I'll dip into time and time again.
The one that delighted me most though, of course, was "A shrewdness of apes". But, and here's the twist in the tale, the phrase was coined over 500 years ago, and the root meaning of the word 'shrew' is wickedness, and 'shrewen' meant 'to curse'.
However, our knowledge of apes and how they think has come to mirror the change in meaning of the word shrewdness, and we now know that they are intelligent and shrewd creatures. And of course, the more modern slang version of 'wicked' also applies to our furry cousins in my humble opinion =]
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Orangutangents
RandomEverybody is somebody else's weirdo: I suspect I may be many people's. Consider this a brain dump, or indeed a Brian dump given the misspelled pseudo-entity who lives in my skull. Tangential thoughts, comments, ideas, and general Brianisms from the...
