Addicted to Animal Groupings
My wife’s mother is a first grade school teacher and she’s teaching her students about grouping names for animals. There are the obvious ones (flock of birds, swarm of locust, herd of buffalo), and then there are the mildly obscure and usually casual dinner trivia ones (gaggle of geese, rabble of butterflies).
But nobody ever told me how absurd and obscure some of these grouping names truly are. It’s fascinating, really. Where this becomes most engaging is when the animal is fairly common, yet we never knew the name of their grouping. Take frogs for example. What is the name for a group of frogs? I bet you weren’t thinking “a bundle”, but that’s exactly what it is. WHAT!? Or what about an odor of skunk?
Some other choice groupings: a bask of Alligator, a shrewdness of ape, a coalition of cheetah, and a cell of eel. But don’t let my preferences sway you, go see for yourself!
*A final footnote. For those of you tossing around the gaggle of geese term at a dinner party. You can be the star of the show when you tell them “actually a gaggle of geese in flight are referred to as a skein, not a gaggle at all.”
