Wan's World

The English Language

The English language has some wonderfully anthropomorphic collective nouns for the various groups of animals.

We are all familiar with:

A Herd of Cows

A Flock of chickens

A School of Fish

A Gaggle of Geese

However, there are some less known collective nouns.

A Pride of Lions

A Murder of Crows

and their cousins, the Rooks and Ravens.

An Exultation of Doves

and presumably because they look so wise,

A Parliament of Owls

Now consider a group of Baboons.

They are the loudest, most dangerous, most obnoxious, most viciously aggressive and least intelligent of all primates.  And what is the proper collective noun for a group of baboons?

Believe it or not…..

A CONGRESS OF BABOONS!

And all along, I thought this was a Congress.

How did I get it so wrong?……Or did I?

That would explain much of what comes out of Washington, Canberra and London…..

You just can’t make this stuff up.