A Watch of Nightingales: The Origin Story of Collective Terms for Animals
Plus, some truly delightful collective terms for people, from a “rascal of boys” to a “superfluity of nuns.”
At the bottom of a breathtakingly dull late 15th century manuscript entitled Grammatica, the exhausted scribe (who signs his name Wulrey de Plecy¹) has left us a little rhyming note unrelated to the text itself:
Nunc scripsi totum pro christo da mihi potum.
Now that I’ve written all of this, for Christ’s sake give me a drink.
There is something rather magical about how this little aside makes the alienating distance of 500 years disappear in an instant. How the sudden intrusion of pique and humor cuts right through the ages and the unfamiliar language to make a human connection.² And it makes me think in particular of another oft-quoted Medieval artifact from the same era—the odd little compendium that’s one of our earliest sources for the “terms of venery,” the extensive group of collective nouns for animals whose playfulness and inventiveness comes alive again each time they’re rediscovered.
