#87440 - Collective nouns
Posted: Wed Jul 27, 2016 12:34 pm
http://theboard.byu.edu/questions/87440/
I don't have a bone to pick with the asker or answerer of this particular question, but collective nouns are a huge pet peeve of mine, from a linguistics perspective. They play into the idea that in order to "properly" speak a language, you have to learn a bunch of secret, hidden rules. There are certainly some collective nouns that are in common enough use to be a part of natural language ("flock," "pack," "school"), but there's no descriptive basis for saying that "murder of crows" is the "correct" term when it's much less common than something like "flock of crows." (A COHA search returns 24 hits for "flock of crows" over a 200-year period, while "murder of crows" only returns one hit from the year 2000.)
I don't have a bone to pick with the asker or answerer of this particular question, but collective nouns are a huge pet peeve of mine, from a linguistics perspective. They play into the idea that in order to "properly" speak a language, you have to learn a bunch of secret, hidden rules. There are certainly some collective nouns that are in common enough use to be a part of natural language ("flock," "pack," "school"), but there's no descriptive basis for saying that "murder of crows" is the "correct" term when it's much less common than something like "flock of crows." (A COHA search returns 24 hits for "flock of crows" over a 200-year period, while "murder of crows" only returns one hit from the year 2000.)