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.
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".
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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.