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FUN WITH WORDS
A Kindness of Mediums
What’s the proper word for a group of barely-read stories?
It’s an interesting feature of English that we have adopted specific words for groups of things. School of fish, pride of lions, colony of ants are just a few of the more common. A simple internet search or joining bar trivia night will reveal a murder of crows, a caravan of camels, or a band of coyotes.
Through very little research, I have found that many of these are holdovers from a time when animals were hunted by speakers of English, and those people devised these strange names not only as a way to identify a group of one thing from the other, but also to fuck with the uninitiated. Also, even though they are “official”, even scientists involved in study of these animals rarely refer to a convocation of eagles, a business of ferrets, or a conspiracy of lemurs. This is my new personal favorite, and makes me wonder what the hell those lemurs have been up to at the National Zoo.
On to the point of this article, which is to celebrate that my “published” number has finally reached 100 on Medium. Looking at many of the people that I follow and admire on Medium, I know that 100 isn’t a huge number but I am proud of it anyway so I’m going to celebrate.
