Another way of thinking about it...imagine you are writing a textbook about the English language for people learning it as a second language. You want to instruct them about how to use English in the real world. Would you tell them to refer to a group of crows as a "murder"?
This might be generational, I'm well read and the other party was of an older generation.
We all live in valleys and it's hard to see over yonder hills, to other worlds and peoples ..
So you used a completely "wrong" collective noun (a group of ravens is supposedly a "parliament") and were understood just as well as if you'd used the "correct" one? Sounds like you've proven the article's point.
I'm also perplexed by the parent's reference to a "parliament" of ravens. Not only have I personally ever only seen it in context of owls, the article actually uses "a parliament of owls" as an example itself.
The weird thing about the "murder of crows" or a "parliament of rooks" is the use of such common words, especially slightly shocking ones like "murder". This raises more eyebrows and feels more like a joke for the unaware.
A "wisdom of wombats", a "lamentation of swans"... An "ambush of tigers" would certainly be interpreted as the act of ambushing.
Look at the list here [0] and you'll find it very random.
I'd go as far to venture that in all contexts you could throw in some made up term. It will be understood by the other person, however they may think that you're a bit strange for referring to "an orgy of ants" for instance.
That's the funny thing about language; it's highly contextual, and humans are great at filling in the gaps based on context if there is some part of a communication that is not understood, miscommunicated or not even heard.
The band Counting Crows has a song, Murder of One. It's how I came across this "trivia".
You mix with different people than I. 90% of my friends would understand that seamlessly - and those that didn't would recognize it as a term of venery from context.
It's not a big issue to me, but my impulse upon hearing about the topic is simply the opposite of the people who keep it alive. It's more twee than is an American, such as myself, using the term twee.
It's the people who tell the others that they are wrong (whichever side of the debate they're on) who make it an issue.
I think there is something to be said for flowery language, but obviously there needs to be a balance struck between it and comprehensibility.
Unfortunately, teachers do teach that and there was a test for the various group names, like a school of fish, a pod of whales, a parliament of owls, etc. And yes, the murder of crows was included. That was in secondary school, though, so admittedly at a higher level of education but it is taught and tested against.
These rarer ones can frequently be replaced with a commonly used one, and often are. I think most people would talk about a 'flock of crows'.
It may be less common, but it's where Kubernetes got its term 'pod.' Docker's mascot is a whale, Kubernetes manages groups of related Docker containers … pod!
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?year_end=2019&year_sta...
If I was needing to refer to a group of crows in this textbook then I'd refer to them by their proper collective noun, a murder of, because that would be correct.
Those three words also stand on their own. "That herd looks unsettled" "Can you hear the pack howling?" etc.
I've yet to hear "murder" without "of crows" following it, so I reject it as the normal word.
(Native English speaker.)
I think it is more that there are two terminologies in different fields, just as, in botany, tomatoes and cucumbers are berries, and strawberries aren’t.
Edit: To explain my position better, modern Science has been using an old word - which belongs to everyone - for its own purposes, which is of course fine! However, members of the general public get to do that, too. Outside Science classrooms, I've seen a lot of annoying linguistic prescriptivism explaining that a committee of scientists got into a room and made a judgement call that the person being addressed is now wrong and must change their behavior because the committee said so, which is a great, if small, example of why there is an ongoing wave of anti-intellectualism.
Another is that the reason why the IAU decided to change the definition appears to have been for cultural reasons as well. Astronomers discovered other Kuiper belt objects. This included Eris, which was more massive than Pluto. They'd either have to tell people "There are more than 9 planets, and we don't know how many there are," or kick Pluto out and continue the myth of the simple solar system (with one fewer planet now). So they went with the more conservative option, by creating a new definition of planet that still isn't formally defined, and by explicitly saying dwarf planets aren't planets. Eris was discovered in 2005, the new IAU definition of planet was agreed upon in 2006.
It's worth noting that prior to this, the IAU didn't even define the word "planet," it was a popularly defined term. So there's an element of asserting control over something outside of their purview simply because they objected to the cultural connotations.
Here's an interesting article from the time that shows some of the thought that went into this[1].
Old definition of 'Planet' is still in play. Because Pluto doesn't meet the definition of 'Planet', it is now called a "Dwarf Planet".
Ultimately, it comes down to the scientific issue of Pluto, Charon, and Eris. Its hard to make Pluto a planet without calling Eris a planet. Pluto also interacts with Neptune and Charon in unfortunate ways unlike other "proper planets", like Earth, Mars, or Mercury.
The IAU definition of “planet” explicitly applies only to the solar system, and the only definition even attempted for exoplanets IIRC is to try to define a dividing line between them and brown dwarfs, effectively “exoplanets” are extrasolar planemos.
> It would be much more practical - that is, useful for actually communicating empirical information - to define a planet as a planemo, Luna, Ceres and Eris included.
I don't see how that follows, since having cleared an orbit is addition empirical information, and information that we are able to develop on solar system objects, if not extrasolar ones, in reasonable time. As is, e.g., whether or not an object is a natural satellite of something orbitting the sun or does so itself.
Right, which I think proves my point - surely we'd like planet and exoplanet to mean equivalent things.
> I don't see how that follows, since having cleared an orbit is addition empirical information, and information that we are able to develop on solar system objects, if not extrasolar ones, in reasonable time.
Well, I'd argue that Pluto (and Ceres before it) shows that it may take us an unreasonably long time. And the current definition awkwardly mixes two things that are really separate concerns: the characteristics of the object itself and what it's orbiting.
I remember actual excitement among the layperson upon the announcement of discovering a 10th planet.
Now with "dwarf planets" no one cares.
Tempus fugit!
It’s so much more exciting to know that the solar system is an enormous continuous spectrum of debris. The debris is named and catalogued, it’s that tangible.
I love seeing children go wide eyed at the mention of Ceres. It’s like the Azores of the planets — there’s another place/planet in the middle of nowhere that no one talks about?!
The final step in this is to recognize that, out of the full spectrum of Trojans to TNOs to moons to planets, the planets really are in a class of their own in terms of long term effect on other bodies in their orbit.
Pluto isn’t a planet. But that doesn’t mean we exclude it. It means we include Ceres and a whole lot more whenever we talk about our local system.
(Or at least the inner parts of our local system that we’ve found, so far.)
If this line of argument doesn't work, I point out that in a phylogenetic/cladistic nomenclature, all tetrapods are fish and dolphins are tetrapods, therefore dolphins are fish (and so are we.) Of course in the traditional nomenclature 'fish' is a paraphyletic group that specifically excludes tetrapods.
To add a more scientific example, "The Biology and Ecology of Giant Kelp Forests" (2015) similarly begins by explaining that kelp are brown macroalgae belonging in the kingdom Chromista rather than Plantae, and are thus is not technically plants. They then explain that they will call them plants anyway for the rest of the book.
It is, by the way, a surprisingly interesting book. Kelp was vastly more important between 150-100 years ago, and the science occasionally dips back to the scientific age of wonder of the late 1800s. (I always enjoy reading the classic papers from those times. They're written completely differently from modern scientific papers. Much less formal.)
Very common in biology: tomatoes and coconuts are fruits, bugs are a specific order of insects, electric eels are not eels, etc...
The people who named Pluto conflated the scientific discovery with an ancient mythology and tradition of wandering stars, as if it were a continuation of it, and now certain people affiliated with the scientific community go around on the Internet telling members of the general public that they're speaking imprecisely about their horoscopes, as if that behavior will have no impact on whether the public will listen to the scientific community on matters like how not to spread covid, vaccines, and climate change.
If, as you seem to say English is decided by usage, then the idea that there is a 'correct' term for a group of bobolinks beyond 'group' is just a fun fiction.
As far as I'm concerned, you're free to describe a group of animals using whatever word conveys the experience best, and since, as you say English lacks a governing council, nobody should worry about using the 'correct' term of venery.
I realise that language is mostly not designed and that there is no specific reason, just like gramatical gender is useless for non-gendered things and still many languages have it. but I'm curious about the historical path that led to that differentiation
Maybe it is like english spelling that seems to mainly be designed to not look childish. Murder of crows sounds very poetic compared to flock.
To hypothesize on a more contentious issue, I think that this ties into contemporary debates on gender identity. The terms "woman" and "man" are ancient and ubiquitous, but only recently seem to be showing as inadequate in certain contexts. Universally defining these terms seems like it would elevate some of these contexts above the others, which would inevitably invite backlash from people for whom these contexts are less common.
Not only that: just because a bunch of people got appointed by the French government, doesn't mean they have any real authority to tell French people how to speak.
Another example from German: in that language, the experts insist that you 'drive' a hot air balloon ('einen Ballon fahren'). Normal people say that you 'fly' a balloon. ('einen Ballon fliegen').
Which one is correct depends on who you talk to. Literally, it depends on your audience.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballonfahren#Fahren_oder_flieg...
No, that's not how it works. Each person and each group is their own authority (at least potentially, if they want to be). You're right that the majority may ignore specialist opinion, but it's equally true that specialists may ignore the majority opinion. It's not unusual for usage to diverge in that way. Take the word "allergy", for example.
Sadly it seems the video of that sketch has been blocked or removed from youtube - the best I can find now is a poorly recorded audio - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgxbAjmwUus