Talk:List of collective nouns by subject

Note

For the person who said the page was overly marked up... you copy an existing line, paste it in where you want it and then change the details. It's not hard. The format can be easily determined from the existing script. Whoever wrote the complaint also managed to delete half the page, and added lots of random characters which demolished the formats on certain lines. I've since fixed it. User:MMGB

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I didn't screw it up

You may not have done so intentionally, but you did - check the history pages. Your browser probably has a text limit for forms and killed everything after a certain point. - User:MMGB

I am the person who said the page was overly marked up and I consider my point completely proven. Here's all I did, which I checked with the Preview feature:

Replace a dead link to "cards" with a live link to "Playing cards|cards", a correction which WWJD here seems to have lost.

I didn't touch any of the ampersand markups, I didn't delete the bottom half of the entry, I didn't do anything but add 14 characters and the rest of the kerflooey was a software bug as far as I am concerned.

I have been writing using markup languages since 1978 from Runoff to XML, I've written markup language documentation, and I managed two groups developing markup language software. I know what I did and I know what an overly marked up page looks like and I know how to fix it. I even know how "easy" it is. I also know that if it is easy to fix one, it is still hard to fix 200 or however many there are here.

Then how come I managed to fix all of the mistakes in under 2 minutes, and reformat the page to remove all of the problems? And, regardless of your above claim to competence, you still managed to bugger up the page anyway? You may claim that you didn't but the history pages prove otherwise. I accept that it was unintentional, but it was still the result of your actions. User:MMGB

The markup as it exists is a table as a complex replacement for simple bullets. There's no excuse for it to continue in existence. It makes it harder to add entries, remove entries, annotate entries, just as I said, and just as I inadvertantly proved.

Not true - cut and paste some code, and try it. You'll see why the table format was the best option, the bullet approach becomes unreadable because of the three columns. Come up with a better solution that retains the readability and usability (bullets definitely do NOT) and I will congratulate you myself. I don't have a fraction of your expertise and would be glad for an improved solution. - User:MMGB

It's an ill-conceived entry

While we're at it, a lot of this entry is erroneous. If I'd done it on purpose, I'd have thrown it all away and reconstructed it, not stopped with merely throwing half of it away.

Says you. Thank you so much for ignoring the hours of work I spent on this, researching the various terms. Where do you think all those ratings came from? I am trying hard not to be offended by this, but after doing the work FOR REAL, some tosser comes in and pronounces it "incorrect" based on his/her personal opinion, is enough to offend anyone. User:MMGB

I see that the wiki collective noun family of entries is huge and undiscriminating, good stuff mixed in with bad,so I won't leap into this without thinking more about it, but it needs attention. At the very least, I would look up each of them in a reliable dictionary.

I wrote the original entry and I did look all of them up in a reliable dictionary, in fact I spent hours doing this. Hence they are labeled "Correct", "Spurious" and "Uncertain". Most of the spurious ones were kept in for their humour value where I thought there was a least a semblance of it. - User:MMGB

Some points:

• These are not properly "collective nouns", they are "nouns of association".

Pedantry. Fact is, the term "collective noun" is in general usage. This is like arguing that we should only refer to "geodesics" not "great circles", even though the latter is technically incorrect. If it disturbs you so badly, put a comment at the beginning of the article... "Technically the correct term is nouns of association, however the term ...(etc)"- User:MMGB

• • Collective nouns are words like "crowd", "people", "team", singular words for plural entities.
  • Nouns of association are a special kind of collective noun that are used to "collect" a group of particular objects, like "school of fish", "pod of whales", "herd of sheep".
• Most of these, even if correctly identified as nouns of association, are not genuine artifacts of the English language, like the examples cited above, but are the products of the "game of venery", a word game in which fanciful names are attached to such groupings, as "a fanfare of strumpets". The most famous of these is "exaltation of larks", but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the correct term for a group of larks is "bevy" and "exaltation" is not even mentioned. Another famous one is "gaggle of geese", but the list fails to note that gaggle should be used only for flying geese, and that walking geese are a "flock". Similarly, a "company of actors" is not necessarily equivalent to a ";cast of actors".

Every noun identified as "valid" was validated in at least one resource. I elected to be inclusive, just because OED doesn't include something doesn't mean it is invalid for this purpose. If Colliers, AHD, Macquarie, et al listed it, I accepted it. OED does not regard "recognise" as a valid spelling, but that is how I spell it anyway. Issues like "gaggle" for flying is an important distinction... why didn't you add it in instead of whining about it here? User:MMGB

• These should not be sorted by subject, they should be sorted by credibility and provenance, as follows:
  • Common nouns of association
  • Technical terms of certain trades or activities, often obsolete
  • Madeup nouns of association with some usage
  • Jokes, witticisms and word play
  • Dopy junk

Ortolan88

Why is your method any better than the existing one? More specifically, why should your method be used to the exclusion of this approach?

This is not the only page that contains collective nouns, there is another page that deals with them sorted by collective term. If you want to go ahead and carry out your final suggestion in a third page, go ahead, it's a good idea. But the sorting by subject is no less valid.

Your entire diatribe seems very self-righteous, and fails to consider the fact that a lot of the decisions made here were the result of trying all of the other options first. If you can determine a better way of formatting the page, you are totally welcome. But just don't run your mouth until you have tested the options. The bullet option (the only alternative you have suggested) was tried and it failed badly, IMO. And your carrying on that "I've been using markup since the dawn of Christ" fails to impress somewhat, on the simple grounds that, be that as it may, you still managed to wipe out half of the article during your editing, unintentional as it may have been. - User:MMGB

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Rude remarks removed. Sorry, personal life impinging on wiki. I'll try to be better. Rancor aside, I think there are some points worth discussing here, but I'll hold off until I have looked at the whole family of entries on these words. I do believe that the distinction between collective nouns in general and nouns of association in particular is worth making. Ortolan88

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Add Origins Section

Something should be added to this article regarding the origins of these collective nouns. I seem to remember that some poets of yore were involved. But I cannot recall. These didn't just come out of no where. They were created, and I think by poets who wanted to. Kingturtle 02:17 Apr 18, 2003 (UTC)

aardvarks An armoury of aardvarks... armoury is a collective noun, but i don't see how aardvarks fit in —Preceding unsigned comment added by Wiki3857 (talk • contribs) 18:54, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

• Origins of colorful collective nouns can be pretty obscure, a lot of the literature out there doesn't cite sources. Some books written for mass-market appeal have collective nouns that the authors just made up! I'd love to see a "Origins" section, but I'd settle for some sources. As far as "armoury of aardvarks," it's mentioned in the book "A Parliment of Owls" ISBN 0143004336, that's all I know about it. Durty Willy 02:42, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

2007-02-7 Automated pywikipediabot message

--CopyToWiktionaryBot 08:28, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

??? What's happened to this page?

Whoever 'fixed' the vandalism or added the ravens section on 23rd September seems to have killed all the formatting

I'll leave it for two days to see if the (I'm sure accidental) damage is fixed by that editor, otherwise I'm going to revert back to before the vandalism

chrisboote —Preceding signed but undated comment was added at 10:44, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

all done now chrisboote 13:21, 3 October 2007 (UTC)

Sources

Many of the group names seem to be almost comedic ("A book of Mormons"), at least the religious ones. If no one can provide sources for these, I'm going to delete them. Some of them could be construed as biased. Squad51 17:11, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

while I agree that some are almost certainly apocryphal (an apocrypha of collective nouns?) it's tricky to weed the grain from the chaff

For example "a book of Mormons" DOES have many references. It's used inside the church to refer to past historic Mormon figures

So eliminating 'biased' entries may be harder than you think

So unless you fancy throwing every one you think might be fishy at a search engine, a thankless task if ever there was one, I'd say leave 'em alone for now until the OED goes wholly online

chrisboote 07:36, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

• I dunno.... I mean, "A douche of jetskiers?"^{(←now deleted)} Come on now, honestly. This list is filled with spontaneous apocrypha. However, it's true that a lot of the unlikelier-sounding ones are actually used widely, and I'm a bit daunted by the sheer size of this list. Does anyone think citation should be required for each collective noun appearing on the list? Also, there are lots of duplicate entries that can be merged together. Maybe a Cleanup template, or Disputed template will help Wikipedians get collective on this mofo? This list needs some help, but I'm not sure what the best way is to get it here. Durty Willy 02:16, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

I concur - there are MANY which are clearly crud, but that's clearly TO ME, so I am at a loss how to go about cleaning this up

I've added a disputed template and cleaned up A-C

If I couldn't find any reference online other than this list or a joke page, I've removed it

chrisboote (talk) 02:46, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Google test?

How about deleting entries which fail the Google test? A whole bunch of 'em do. Bonehed (talk) 04:17, 2 January 2008 (UTC)