By S. Jayasankaran
“A malaprop walks into a bar looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epithets and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.”
The joke lies in “malaprop,” a mistaken use of a word in place of a similar-sounding one. It made the sentence very funny.
In truth, many grammatical oddities in English can be amusing, even banalities like collective nouns.
A collective noun is a word used to name a group of people, animals, or things so that they might be treated as a single unit. An example would be a “team” of players.
How might we break this down further?
In Malaysia we have pesky Mat Rempit and far too many Datuks for love or money.
Maybe they might be grouped like so: a “nuisance of Rempit” or an “irrelevance of Datuks.”
It was a diehard Communist Nikita Khrushchev who dismissed politicians as being the same the world over. “They promise to build a bridge even when there is no river,” he grumbled to then US vice-president Richard Nixon.
A “mendacity of politicians,” perhaps?
Collective nouns for people are unsurprising as in a “band of musicians,” or a “flock of tourists.”
But there is also a “bench of magistrates.” And, an “illusion of magicians” and a “coven of witches”.
Lest we forget, there’s also a “piety of priests,” a “lying of pardoners,” and a “confederacy of dunces.”
How would we group women of the night, those red-light temptresses?
A “stable of prostitutes” perhaps, even a “warren of whores?”
We up our game considerably with excellent substitutes such as: a “tray of tarts,” a “flourish of strumpets” and, wait for it, “an anthology of pros.”
Collective nouns for things or inanimate objects are more prosaic as in a “range of mountains” or a “fleet of ships.”
But some phrases trip off the tongue more felicitously such as a “giggle of clowns,” a “quiver of arrows” and a “riot of colour.”
There’s also a “superfluity of nuns,” an ironic reference to the overabundance of said species during medieval times.
But the imaginative reach of the collective noun truly flourishes when used to group animals.
Who was the wordsmith who coined a “murder of crows” or a “parliament of owls”?
Credit the linguistic stylist who invented a “pandemonium of parrots” and a “shrewdness of apes.”
There are stranger associations like a “plague of lemmings.” It’s largely associated with the animal’s propensity to throw themselves en masse off the cliffs of Madagascar into the seas below.
An Oxford wag used the trait as an argument for mass suicide. He scribbled this opinion on a bathroom wall in the university: “A 100,000 lemmings can’t be wrong.”
Indeed, group descriptions pile up. There is a “flamboyance of flamingos”, a “crash of rhinos” and, a “business of ferrets.”
Owing to their tendency to engage in deep and crafty machination, there is a “conspiracy of lemurs.”
Finally, there’s an “unkindness of ravens,” a “wisdom of wombats” and a “tower of giraffes.”
OK, this should satisfy even the most pedantic of pundits.
WE