Collective nouns, redux

Posted by James Briggs on July 30, 2003

In Reply to: Collective nouns, redux posted by GPP on July 30, 2003

: Rummaging down the current discussion page, I was intrigued to find the post "Collective nouns" of 07/09/03, submitting "a float of hippos" and "a tower of giraffes". Googling the term "collective nouns" yielded a bevy of different sites, some more extensive than others, and many containing made-up humorous suggestions. Of the ones I looked at, my impression was that
[Dead link removed - ed]
: seemed generally to be relatively authoritative, with fewer self-consciously farcical entries than many other such sites.

: Checking the archives of this site, I find "a kine of cows", which I can't believe can be correct. "Cows" in the collective are indeed "kine", but "cows" itself is collective in that identical sense; one would never say "a kine of cows", because "kine" carries no more sense of a group than does the term "cows" itself.

: The original question had to to with a collective noun describing a group of people; most of the sites found by Google gave facetious suggestions, but one or another of them might yield something useful.

: Further rummaging down the page brought me to the 07/08/03 entry for "spanner", which reminded me of Lennon's famous book "A Spaniard in the Works."

Gary,
The date format has been mentioned before. However, the above reference is very confusing to the non- North American members. I frequent Genealogy sites. Many have the format 30 July 03, or similar. Can't we adopt that or, alternatively, July 30 03? Using a numeric date is much less understandable than an alpha-numeric one. PLEASE.