In The Guardian of 2/20/21: “Tom Gauld suggests some literary collective nouns – cartoon”:
(#1) The last collective noun — gruop — excited a certain amount of appalled attention from some readers, who seem not to have gotten the joke
Not just collectives, but terms of venery.
From my 2/18/12 posting “Gay venery”:
A term of venery, or venereal term, is a group-specific collective noun (like pride in a pride of lions). The early terms of venery were for animals; the word venery comes from Old French, earlier from Latin, based on the verb meaning ‘to hunt’ (the other sense of venereal, having to do with love and sexual desire, has a different etymology).
There’s quite a tradition of unearthing unusual and obsolete terms of venery (a murder of crows), for entertainment, and another tradition of inventing fanciful ones (an anthology of pros, for prostitutes); see Michael Quinion’s page entitled “precision of lexicographers”.
Now we have proposals for queerfolk, taking off from Mike Thomas’s a hive of homosexuals
My personal favorite on this (ultimately, quite long) list was Rod Williams’s a basket of fruits — very cute, on several levels.
And then, in #1 in my 3/30/16 posting “Three for the 30th”, this Zits strip:
(#2) A series of five established terms of venery — who could resist a prickle of porcupines, which is both phonologically and semantically excellent? — and then one especially invented for high school students
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