Murder!

I saw a murder on my way back from shopping this morning --

a murder of crows, that is.

A murder of crows -- meaning a group of crows in flight -- is an example of venery. According to The Virtual Linguist,

"Terms of venery are what are usually called collective nouns: a pride of lions, a pack of wolves, a herd of cows etc. The now archaic word venery once referred to animals that were hunted and also to the hunt itself. The word comes from the Latin venari, to hunt. The word venison, which now means the meat of deer but originally meant the meat of any hunted animal also comes from the same Latin root.

"In the 15th and 16th centuries hunting was considered a noble pursuit and a very popular book called The Book of St Albans was de rigueur on every gentleman's bookshelf. This book listed hunting and falconry terms, and the nobles learnt such expressions as an exaltation of larks, a parliament of rooks and a murmuration of starlings as a way of showing their knowledge and emphasising [sic] their difference from the plebs, who didn't have such a wide and picturesque vocabulary."

There are lots of these words, many of them truly archaic like those in The Book of St Albans, others created in a whimsical mood by more recent writers, some of which make it into more common usage. 

I recently skimmed through James Lipton's wonderful collection of such terms, An Exaltation of Larks. He gives scrupulously researched accounts of the origin of many of the older terms, provides playful contemporary suggestions and even rules for a game to create your own terms.

Which set me to thinking of such things. For example,

• a round of robins
• a pistol of Petes
• a jack of lanterns
• a trick of treats
• a hypotenuse of triangles
• a dilly of dallies
• a pot of bellies
• a bog of blogs 
• a beam of Trekkies 
• an et of ceteras