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Collective nouns

What fun:

There were great celebrations as the first giraffe, Asiwa, was floated across Lake Baringo, western Kenya, to a sanctuary on the mainland

She had been cut off from the rest of her tower for months

The one for giraffes is “a tower”. You could probably have guessed that but I’d not heard it before.

23 thoughts on “Collective nouns”

  1. https://www.shentonsafaris.com/blog/a-confusion-of-giraffes/

    There are a few collective nouns used by guides to describe a group of Giraffes e.g.: kaleidoscope, journey, herd or even `tower’, which in my opinion is more commonly associated with Vultures. We prefer to use `journey’ to describe a collection of Giraffes

    So there is perhaps no authoritative collective noun. However, a bloat of hippos might be ok

  2. Diogenes pissing on the chips again

    Having examined Google ngram, none of the English language corpora shows a single occurrence for “Tower of giraffes”. The most used collective noun is the disappointing “herd”

  3. ‘The area has been plagued with intense rain, which has caused the water level of Lake Baringo, which is surrounding the peninsula, to steadily rising up to six inches a day.’

    New def of ‘peninsula.’

    “Colonialist David O’Connor, president of Dallas, Texas-based Save Giraffes Now, said: ‘There is great urgency to execute this rescue'”

    Fixed it.

    BTW, the ‘conservationists’ put the giraffes on the ‘peninsula’ in the first place.

  4. I thought “pod” only applied to killer whales. According to the ngram, school of whales was more popular up till 1990, whereupon pod took over. As at 2018, pod is used about twice as much as school.

    Up until 1959, there were few occurrences of “pod”. “School” was 3 times as popular. Prior to then, it was over 8 times as popular. Something must have started to change in marine biology around the end of the fifties, which culminated in the great pod takeover of 1990

    https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Pod+of+whales%2Cschool+of+whales&year_start=1900&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true

  5. If the makeshift raft capsizes, all will drown. ‘Cept the giraffe, which can just walk to shore.

    *Hard to drown a 16’ tall animal.

  6. When they gallop, they seem to have a fairly low centre of gravity. They must have massive leg bones and ribcage, because they are not as susceptible as ultra tall humans to leg damage. Their vital organs, especially the heart, must be sizeable as well – all that aqueous fluid sloshing around the carcase

  7. Gamecock, do you remember the speculation about brontosaurus etc, that they lived in water, in order to support their long necks… Has it ever been resolved how cold-blooded lizards could live with such long necks?

  8. And how can politicians keep their heads above water, given their extraordinary brass necks?

    Also

    An Abbott of Hippos works just as well as A Hippo of Abbotts, given that it’s a relationship where 1 Abbott = 1 Hippo (and vice versa).

  9. So Much For Subtlety

    Gamecock December 5, 2020 at 2:48 am – “Dinosaurs were more like birds and mammals than lizards. Quite possibly homeothermic.”

    Maybe. Although the evidence of this seems to have come from a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon – “Because they are way cooler that way”.

  10. Actually, the evidence is quite straight forward. Birds arose from dinosaurs. Some say they are dinosaurs. And they are “warm-blooded.”

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