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.
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"?