this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
118 points (100.0% liked)
chapotraphouse
13541 readers
766 users here now
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Gossip posts go in c/gossip. Don't post low-hanging fruit here after it gets removed from c/gossip
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I got curious about this so I looked it up on the ol' Ngram Viewer. Went through a "list of unusual animal group names". In some cases the unusual name was literally never used, in some cases it had once been used but is falling out of favor, in some cases there was maybe one person who used it in writing a century ago and then more recently people dug it up and brought it back, and in some cases it's a complete neologism, never having been used before the late 20th century.
I attribute some of these trends, especially the spike in the more exotic names since the early 2000s, to the ability to check online for something. In regular speech I think people revert to the simpler categories of pack, herd, flock, school, swarm, cluster.