Maybe I and my friends are hopelessly pedantic nerds, but we definitely use "murder" to denote a group without using the word "crows" explicitly (e.g. "I saw a

Maybe I and my friends are hopelessly pedantic nerds, but we definitely use "murder" to denote a group without using the word "crows" explicitly (e.g. "I saw a murder flying overhead on my way through the meadow"). Generally, this reminds me of proposals to move to a universal time zone. Even if you could remove the more obscure terms from common usage, there's plenty of literature and music that use them, so people will still need to learn then for historical reasons. This, your pursuit of simplicity actually increases total complexity. I suppose the difference is that natural languages evolve constantly, so everyone is used to the slow drift as a part of life and occasionally having to look up phrases that have fallen out of use when reading older books.