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Group nouns (eg "a murder of crows" or "a flobble of jelly") also started out as a differentiation between the aristocrats and uneducated masses: > Even in the

• eesmith 7y ago
  I first came across that Lipton citation through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_English_terms_of_venery,_by_animal#Parliament_of_Owls https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_English_terms_of_... , which quotes "Narrative and learning to teach: implications for teacher-education curriculum" saying: > Lipton discovered that such collections are quite old, dating from the mid-15th century. These days teacher educators would probably curricularize this material as word-play, perhaps a motivating introduction to poetry. Along these lines, for example, Griffin recently invented 'a brace of orthodontists'. But in the 15th century the educative purpose was much more sober. Such lists were a valuable resource to provide a gentleman with the means of social acceptability and to spare him the embarrassment of some blunder at table---of referring, for example, to a bunch or flock of owls when the proper term is a parliament of owls. In such incidents, 'those who are wiser may have the laugh of you, and we who love you may be shamed', a quote from a novel by Arthur Conan Doyle in which a young man is being schooled in the proper terminology to avoid embarrassment (Lipton 1993: 1).