Author: Timothy Snyder / Source: Big Think
- In the English language, groups of animals often have interesting names. But a murder?
- It has to do with crow’s scavenger-like nature…
- … but ornithologists are arguing that we change the name.
In a classic episode of The Simpsons, Homer destroys Marge’s garden scarecrow and inadvertently becomes leader to the local crows.
Marge is hesitant to share her bed with a “gang of crows,” and Homer gently rebukes her, “It’s a murder. A group of crows is called a murder.”That got me wondering: Why doesn’t Marge just leave Homer already? It wasn’t a few episodes back that she learned Homer never told her about his Vegas wife. How is becoming god-emperor to a murder of crows not grounds for categorical divorce?
Then again, some questions will be forever insoluble, so I turned my attention to something more manageable. Why exactly is it a murder of crows? I know English has a fondness for giving animals fanciful group names, especially birds. A parliament of owls, a charm of finches, a lamentation of swans, the list goes on and on. But why are crows stuck with such a mean-spirited moniker, while ravens — a much larger member of the Corvidae family — live with the much less severe “unkindness of ravens”? For that matter, why the fancy group names in the first place?
The answer, I discovered, lies in terms of venery. No, not that venery. At least, I hope not, but be prepared for this to get real weird, real fast.
NEW DELHI, INDIA – SEPTEMBER 28: A black crow seen eating street snack made of puffed rice outside India Gate, on September 28, 2018 in New Delhi, India.
(Photo by Biplov Bhuyan/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)Terms of venery are special types of collective nouns that denote groups of animals. The word venery entered English in the early 14th century through the Medieval Latin venaria, which means “beasts of the chase, game.” Although archaic by today’s standards, venery can still be used to mean “the practice of hunting.”
If you’re curious, the word’s contemporary usage — that is, “indulgence of sexual pleasures” — entered English in the mid-15th century through the Medieval Latin veneria, or “sexual intercourse.” Likely these two became homonyms as a play on words. The sport of hunting being compared to hunting for a mate. Clever, no?1
This history is why terms of venery sound like verbal filigree. They weren’t coined by scientists creating a way to catalogue species, but by 15th-century English gentlemen who were showing off their wit.2 When these Englishmen went hunting, they would devise names for animal groups based on their poetic interpretation of nature. Some of these terms were clever (a charm of hummingbirds), some obvious (a paddling of ducks), and others just pretentious (an ostentation of peacocks, really?).
Nor was the trend limited to birds. Terms of venery gave us congregations of alligators, armies of caterpillars, cauldrons of bats, and sloths of bears.
These kennings eventually found their way into books — such as in the 15th century The Boke of Saint Albans, a treaties on hawking, hunting, and heraldry — where they were picked up by the literate class. As time went on, they gained an air authority and evolved from…
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