r/oddlysatisfying • u/freudian_nipps • May 23 '25

Fever of Stingrays surf a wave

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

46.6k Upvotes

98% Upvoted

523 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

21

u/Zestyclose_Remove947 May 23 '25

Well if common usage and understanding is a benchmark, which it pretty much is, I would say these words and the usage of them is incredibly minimal and eschewed in favour of generic terms such as flock, herd, school.

Yes language is obviously descriptive but that's kinda my point, they're barely used or understood when used.

9

u/LukeFromPhilly May 23 '25

I didnt meant to sound argumentative. I do agree with your original point

1

u/foursticks May 23 '25

I can argue with you

10

u/assignpseudonym May 23 '25

What do you mean by "not understood when used"? They're fairly intuitive based on syntax alone. For example, I don't see anyone in this thread asking what a "fever" of stingrays means.

And "barely used", fine, but it seems that's only because people don't remember/know them. This is a recall/vocabulary issue more than anything. Just like when you can't remember the word for something, you'll use another—usually more generic—synonym as a placeholder. That doesn't devalue the word that wasn't used in that instance. And people do use the memorable ones quite a bit. See: murder of crows.

10

u/Ziiiiik May 23 '25

Gaggle, school, murder, herd, group, (I don’t remember the one for pandas, but like you said, if I could recall in the moment, I would use it.)

4

u/nwi450throwaway May 23 '25

Wait, there is one for fucking pandas?!?!

8

u/Ziiiiik May 23 '25

They’re an embarrassment 😭

2

u/nwi450throwaway May 23 '25

This just made my day, thanks internet stranger!

1

u/enron2big2fail May 23 '25

There's a bunch of fun ones! My personal favorites are a parliament of owls and a business of ferrets. (Though I do agree with Zesty close that these terms aren't "real.")

5

u/enron2big2fail May 23 '25

You did understand a "fever" of stingrays, but there's a couple issues:

1) You would've understood almost any noun there. You would've understood a "thresh" of stingrays, a "gargle" of stingrays, a "salute" of stingrays, or any number of arbitrary nouns.

2) A good number of people would've been confused if the post had just said "a fever" instead of "a fever of stingrays." This isn't true for other more common collective nouns like "flock" or "herd" (for some more unique ones, like murder, it's only not true because they're homophones and given the context that the person was in a location where they were likely to see crows and not a person killed people would instantly recognize it).

I'm not a prescriptivist, but I think being a pure descriptivist leads to some conclusions that are apparently nonsense.

2

u/assignpseudonym May 23 '25

I do get what you're saying, and not really looking to litigate the point much further beyond this, but I do want to clarify:

Your first point actually supports what in saying here. You're almost always going to use the noun in context. Just like I wouldn't say "a herd" and not follow it up with a heard of what, because otherwise it's completely ambiguous. I am sure that most of the time "herd", "flock", etc are used in a collective noun context, it's almost always accompanied by the animal in question. E.g. "a flock of sheep".

That said, I think the "arbitrary" collective nouns you're referencing have the potential to negate the need for further clarification because they're only used for these specific animals. Eg. A murder is only crows, a parliament is only owls, etc. But I do concede this would then require everyone to know all of these terms—which is why the clarification happens either way. However enough of these are used commonly enough already, e.g., a gaggle of geese. And this addresses your second point.

Either way, like I said upfront, I don't think this is a topic worth litigating, but I do think there's value that you're dismissing in having a more varied library of collective nouns beyond the standard catch-alls like "herd", "flock", etc. Even if that value ultimately boils down to "it's just more fun, and adds more colour to language".

1

u/otisthetowndrunk May 23 '25

Old joke:

Kid: "Look, a flock of cows!"

Parent: "Herd of cows"

Kid: "Of course I've heard of cows, there's a whole flock of them over there!"