Herman is thankful that Gator McBumpypants doesn’t eat flying things.
Gator McBumpypants wishes everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. And to the turkey he says,
I don’t eat flying things if that’s what you’re worried about.
Don’t forget to pick up your free kindle download today to share with the whole family!
And for more fun Gator and Herman now have their own theme song and it is now on their video
A Cover of Coots
Yesterday’s writing group was incredibly fun, thanks to Ralph Cornish presenting an exploration of collective nouns. We’re all familiar with at least a few collective nouns that we use in regular speech: a hill of beans, a mountain of debt, a litter of pups. But there are so many more fun and interesting collective nouns. The earliest list dates from around 1450.
For our group writing exercise, Ralph wrote out a selection of collective nouns and let us pick one from a bowl. We then wrote about our selection for 15 minutes. I grabbed A Transparency of Toupees. That made me so happy.
Ralph picked his selections from a fun, beautifully illustrated book, An Exaltation of Larks: The Ultimate Edition
Mr. Lipton sorts the terms of venery (term for hunting game) into six families:
1. Onomatopoeia – a gaggle of geese, a murmuration of starlings
2. Characteristic – a leap of leopards, a skulk of foxes
3. Appearance – a knot of toads, a parliament of owls
4. Habitat – a shoal of bass, a nest of rabbits
5. Comment – richness of martens, a cowardice of curs
6. Error (resulting from an incorrect transcription by a scribe or printer, faithfully preserved in the corrupted form by consequent compilers) – a school of fish, originally shoal
The book contains more than a thousand terms. Here are some of my favorite:
An ingratitude of children
An untruth of summoners
A rhapsody of blues
A wince of dentists
A business of flies
A smack of jellyfish
A labor of moles
An illusion of painters
A worship of writers
A conjunction of grammarians
A browse of readers
Here’s hoping we all find instance to use colorful terms of venery in our writing.
What’s your favorite collective noun?
Experience Writing 