A leap of leopards and a barrel of monkeys

The reason for this is that almost everyone is already aware just how good collective nouns for animals are; however this doesn’t mean that we have the ability to remember them for more than ten minutes (long enough to tell one amazed friend or acquaintance). Neither does this previous knowledge diminish the pleasure of reading them all over again.

So here are a few highlights:

• A leap of leopards
• A barrel of monkeys
• A crash of rhinoceroses
• A parliament of owls
• An unkindness of ravens
• An army of frogs
• A shiver of sharks
• A tower of giraffes
• And finally, birds are a flight in the air and a flock on the ground.

Now clearly some of these seem fairly likely while others seem just a little bit made up, which got me thinking about all the crazy words that we use all the time. We’ve all been there when you’re trying to remember how to spell a word and once you’ve been looking at it for more than a few seconds it becomes nonsense (I find swan is particularly bad for this; although quite why I can’t spell it I’m never sure).

The BBC news magazine this week featured an interesting article about words that find their origins in World War I. My personal highlights being: ‘blighty’, a corruption of the Hindu word for homeland bilayti and ‘cushy’, from kushi, Hindi for comfortable.

Some other etymological treats (etymology: the study of the origin of words) include the fact that we say ‘checkmate’ when we win a game of chess because in Persian ‘Shah Mat’ means ‘the king is dead’ - obvious enough once you know. For any French speakers out there, another odd one: ‘corduroy’ literally translates as the cloth of the king, ‘cord du roi’.

Perhaps most suited to our particular purpose here however is the origin of the word ‘trivia’. It’s not really a surprise that it comes from Latin, ‘tri’ being three and ‘via’ street. In this back-in-the-day scenario the trivia comes in the form of a notice board which was usually placed at intersections. You might be interested in the information on the board, you might not; hence they were bits of trivia.

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