A trivia of collective nouns

Four and twenty blackbirds

I have always been fascinated by collective nouns, some so interesting you wonder how they come about. On my walks a few days ago, I came across an interesting sight, blackbirds I thought were crows or even rooks had settled upon the poles of a fence, but when I was speaking to the lady with her companion that feeds the birds, the other day, I used the collective noun embarrassment which I knew was wrong and she suggested parliament.

A parliament of rooks or a murder of crows

A parliament of crows, I thought when I next went by, but it was another few days before I saw a sufficient number settle on the poles of the fences to make it necessary to take a picture and tell a story. Then, she might be correct if the blackbirds were rooks rather than crows; the collective nouns are, a murder of crows or a parliament of rooks. Apparently, the collective noun for crows comes from superstition; the belief that they are harbingers of death sent by the devil or are witches in disguise.

An embarrassment of SANs

Rightly, it is an embarrassment of pandas, but I have also applied that collective noun to SANs, SeniorAdvocates of Nigeria, senior lawyers that the influential troop to the courts to intimidate the prosecution and the bench, usually in the tens that the cost of justice is prohibitive even when the defendant is guilty as sin but has more legal firepower than the state can muster.

I will not go into the list of collective nouns, but one that anyone would love to know for trivia is the collective noun for geese, they are a gaggle of geese on land, a skein of geese in flight and a plump of geese in water. Never give the wrong collective noun to the appearance of things or you are set for, should I say, am embarrassment?

References

Country Life: Collective nouns for birds

Merriam-Webster: A Melody of Harpers and a Poverty of Pipers

Wikipedia: List of animal names

Coronavirus streets in Manchester - III

Social animals are we

Much as progress, civilisation, technology, human ingenuity, and resourcefulness has brought amazingly miraculous feats to our modern-day life, this period of quarantine and self-isolation has highlighted some fundamental needs.

Chief amongst them is human interaction, my beau and I have co-opted Zoom as our video conferencing tool over WhatsApp, as Skype was not reliable enough, except for voice calls when other means of communication are unavailable. How much we would have preferred to be together instead.

I had not left my apartment since Saturday and at other times when I have gone shopping, it was a solitary event. Only once before had one of the store attendants ventured a decent conversation and it was mainly about the lockdown. My friends do attempt to keep my spirits up, calling on the phone and having long conversations, but that is no substitute.

They were really there

This afternoon, I heard voices in the corridor outside my door, we have 5 apartments in my wind and the length of the corridor is probably 20 metres or more. I looked out and saw my neighbour opposite who had passed a note under my door a few weeks ago offering assistance and help with my shopping, her daughter and my next-door neighbour.

We were all properly spaced apart and after exchanging pleasantries, we talked for about 15 minutes. You can imagine how useful the interaction was, it gave me the feeling that I wasn’t losing my marbles, and that for all my tendency to looking myself away from the public, I still need this social expression, if just for the sake of sanity. We are social animals.

Grant them eternal repose

Later, I went to my local store, in fact, I visited 3 stores, and all had run out of flour. Is everyone baking a cake? Suffice it to say, all hotels are closed, only restaurants offering takeaways are open and suppose they only use couriers. The city is almost a ghost town and it is unlikely the lockdown would be lifted on Easter Monday.

Meanwhile, as our Prime Minister sits up in high spirits being tended to by an Italian consultant in an Intensive Care Unit we are given the inclination he does not really need, another 938 people gave up the ghost in the last 24 hours and I cannot help but wonder how many of those souls needlessly died before their time. If …

My thoughts are with the many whose lives have been touched with the sorrow at the departure of a loved one. God rest the souls of the beloved and strengthen the hearts of their survivors.

To Tenerife - Loro Parque

To Tenerife at last

Visiting Tenerife today was a thrill, after all my fuss, it was still a day out to the zoo. The pickup to Agaete where we boarded a ferry was 10 minutes late but I must say that this trip was organised by the same company that cancelled the trip for Tuesday, late on Monday evening.

I would suppose there are empires in that organisation where one excels at incompetence whilst another department strives to make things happen – somehow booking direct and booking through a hotel tour representative can make a whole lot of difference, I still never found out why the tour was cancelled.

At a bearing from 310 degrees we set sail for Santa Cruz de Tenerife and it was all over in just about 70 minutes.

Loro Parque

On disembarking we boarded a bus and headed for Loro Parque on the western side of Tenerife, it was established in 1972 as a parrot aviary but has grown to include a larger variety of animals and it is the home all sorts of endangered or threatened species.

There is such a fascination for watching sea lions and dolphins perform, but we also had the added fun of watching orca whales. When we arrived in the Orca Ocean arena, the cameras zoomed in on me which was beamed out to the big screen with a balloon callout 'bald is beautiful' – I could only wag a finger at the prankster.

Hard entertainment

Sometimes, I wonder what it takes to entertain us. When we watched the Diana Ross tribute performance, each completed song drew polite applause.

A few days later we watched a Chinese acrobatic troupe and as each performance got a bit more difficult we seemed to be less appreciative of the last and were slow to applaud the next.

Imagine, the man was balancing on one end of plank which was placed on top of the round side of a cylinder and was using the principle of levers to flip bowls from the other end of the plank to the top of his head. He did it with three bowls at a time and then a cup and finally flipped a spoon into the cup.

Another performance was the legs of a chair each balanced on 4 beer bottles and the man doing handstands on the back and seat of the chair, he went on to balance another chair unevenly on the first chair and still do handstands but each consequent applause was grudging, I probably initiated the most appreciation for those acts.

A lady spinning tables with her feet on the table edges and obliquely, then going on to spin a colleague on a barrel, really awe-inspiring stuff as far as I was concerned.

Fascinated more by animals

So watching sea lions, then dolphins and finally orca whales do the same acts of jumping out of the water, going through hoops and splashing around, whilst being incentivised through frequent handouts of fish was in no way boring as if humans were to do the same thing, each repeated act still drew increasing applause.

Animals do repetitive things compared to humans doing unique things and we felt better entertained by the animals.

By the time I returned to the hotel, there was great consideration on their part of offer a cold buffet, but as the saying in Yoruba goes, the late night visitor would hardly have choices for the food laid before him – a salad and a bottle of cold water, you could not complain at all.

Squirrels grabbing my nuts

The Spider's web

I walked into my main bedroom, looked up and sighted a large cobweb, as I tried to take it down; I had to be sure there were no tripwires in the web that could set off alarms at the spying headquarters of the spider empire.

Apparently, my competitors had outsourced the job of spying to this colony of spiders that unbeknownst to me were recording and transmitting information to places unknown. Eight-legged with hundreds of eyes - I have to be careful.

The spiders have somehow fanned out through the house, but since the rendezvous point has been tampered with, I believe the spiders would not be able to upload the information to the spy headquarters and as they expend energy in rebuilding the network, their memory banks would be exhausted leaving me temporarily save from unwarranted espionage.

Animal spy

Living on the 7^th floor, I have found that the spy network have not be able to engage mosquitoes in their nefarious activities, the thought of spies sucking blood at night for research purposes is scary enough.

Before you look out to see if it is that time for the maximum effect of the lunar cycle, the Iranians captured 14 squirrels that had the outsourced contract for spying on Iran.

It would appear they were employed by the Zionists and Great Satan - Tut! Tut! They must be nuts, but could it be the Iranian nuts or the Iranians that are nuts?

However, before this madness beclouds our sensibilities, pigeons have delivered intelligence, chickens have searched out chemical contamination and dolphins have sought out underwater mines.

Ah! The dog comes round for a stroking - Fetch!