Never heard of a whisper, but never heard of a lot ofthese either (some sound made up by five-year-olds).
this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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I remember reading through the list and thinking "wtf is a 'clowder,' hopefully they don't mean 'chowder*'"? That's at least 20 years ago. I've never heard "whisper."
*I have some familiarly with Boston, the land of "chowda," which is not know to contain cats.
Does anybody actually use these goofy terms for groups of animals? Seems like they mostly exist as a novelty.
Well they make some great puns/jokes.
A man regularly was feeding crows in his yard in an attempt to get them to follow and protect him.
He was arrested for attempted murder.
People use "pod of dolphins" relatively often.
Is there even a reason they exist? Like, is it actually important to a biologist or something to say "herd of cows" instead of "group of cows"?
the explanation i heard once is that they were made by rich hunter fellas so they could determine who else was a rich hunter fella
Murder of crows is the only one I've seen used unironically
I've also used an unkindness of ravens.
you've never heard flock of geese? herd of cows? school of fish? these are incredibly common.
Those aren't the ones I'm talking about. Flocks, herds, and schools apply to many different kinds of birds, land animals, and fish, respectively. Why would anyone need to use the word "murder" instead of "flock" for crows? A cackle of hyenas? A conspiracy of lemurs? Let's be serious here. What's wrong with saying a group of lemurs?
Considering your user name and it's interesting history, I'm surprised you aren't in the "language can be fun" camp.
And it can be fun we don't have to limit ourselves to a single word for things.
You can say "group of lemurs" all you want, most people never even find out these constructed terms. The only place you might run into trouble is with the ones that have been around long enough to have entered common usage because people like them a lot, like a murder of crows. Worst case scenario, you call the hundred crows blanketing your yard a flock, and someone tells you that it's a murder and gets a little pissy about it.
But, why are you using flock for crows, and not just group? Because they're birds, obviously. We all know that a group of birds is a flock. How do we know that? Because at some point, people decided that it was useful or fun to have a separate word for birds.
You can trace the etymology of "flock" further back than "murder", because it definitely predates it. But that doesn't make it better. Just older in that usage.
We don't have to make language boring and drab to be understood. Doing so would be a brobdingnagian task with no benefit. If you've never run into a word, or a word usage, you can use other words to communicate and discover what the person means. Like "dude, wtf it's brobdingnagian and why didn't you say massive or gigantic or any of the dozen or so other ways of expressing double plus big"
We don't need more than one word for any given concept, we only need modifiers. But why the fuck would we limit ourselves that way? You really want to go around double-plussing everything? Or should we only use scientific nomenclature for everything?
I know damn good and well that this divide exists. Where people think that language should only contain single terms per concept, and other people think that relying on single terms is limiting too much, and rarely does one side of that convince the other of anything.
But, I'm firmly in the camp of making language and conversation a living thing, full of fun and poetry and interesting thoughts. We can save formal language for formal situations and not suffer any issues the rest of the time.
Yeah, language can be very fun. That's why I'm saying those terms are fun novelties, like a Lemmy username, not really useful in any practical sense.
It was a popular thing in the 14th and 15th centuries to compile these lists of collective nouns for animals - pretty much made up from whole cloth, and definitely as a novelty. Many of them come from the Book of St. Albans.
I dunno, I'd say they're as useful as any other terms.
I think language having the ability to say things in various ways is very practical. if you try to read a book written by someone who only says things in one way all the time, it's probably going to be a dull book.
None of those are goofy terms though...
A flamboyance of flamingos? A business of ferrets? A sloth of bears?
A gay agenda of peacocks
you only think they are goofy because they are more common, so you're used to the terms. How is "murder" of crows any more silly than a "school" of fish?
I guess I just think that there's a marked difference between using collective nouns that already exist in a language and making up brand new ones whole cloth just for the sake of being clever.
Merriam-Webster writes that most terms of venery fell out of use in the 16th century, including a "murder" for crows. It goes on to say that some of the terms in The Book of Saint Albans were "rather fanciful", explaining that the book extended collective nouns to people of specific professions, such as a "poverty" of pipers. It concludes that for lexicographers, many of these do not satisfy criteria for entry by being "used consistently in running prose" without meriting explanation. Some terms that were listed as commonly used were "herd", "flock", "school", and "swarm".
The technical term for this is called a collective noun in English. I did some quick googling, which unfortunately returned a ton of AI slop that I won't repost here. But it did return tons of answers.
My thought is, your school probably did teach you it was called a Whisper, but who's to say what's the authority on collective nouns.
For some reason a collective of cats sounds like some sort of organized crime group that wears suits.
My cat doesn't wear a suit, though probably partakes in organized crime. 🤔
This made me think of Animal Collective... Great, now I've gotta listen to Merriweather Post Pavilion when I get home
I've only heard it called a clowder. I have heard some jokey names for collective nouns, but I think only a few are semiofficial? Like the murder of crows, etc.
This post gives me a good idea for a new name for a group of clams.
I've only heard "clowder", "conference", and "pack".
Never heard of a whisper of cats before.
Maybe someone in your family started saying that and that's where you picked it up.
I've herd multiple (pun intended).
Whisper, I've only seen rarely. Clowder almost as rarely.
The most common I've run into is a Pride, when folks aren't just using a generic collective like herd or group.
But I have heard whisper used, though it was most often in a regular voice; neither whispered nor shouted. But sometimes it was whispered. Whispering about a whisper of whiskered cats just seems appropriate to me.
Imagine, you wake up and see a thousand cats surrounding your house. They sit, silently staring at your door. Wouldn't you want someone to come up behind you and whisper into your ear "don't open the door or that whisper will find its way in, and silently siphon our souls"? And then you could ask "why are you whispering, and how did you get in my house?"
And, of course, you would turn and there would be nobody there, only the fading outline of someone you can't quite remember because their soul was taken already, and memory drifts away when one is stolen.
School of fish is common enough to say that is what the group is called, just like many groups of mammals are herds or packs depending on whether they are predators or prey. A murder of crows is common enough in memes to say the term is currently used although a flock of crows is probably even more commonly used in the real world because flocks is used a lot for birds.
If it isn't commonly used then that isn't what they are called in the modern day or is only used in specific contexts.
Most of the things you will see online are either something that was used for a period of time in the past, used in a very limited context, or someone being creative on the internet and it getting repeated in those lists that are as reliable as the ones that attribute quotes to the wrong people. If you watch very many nature shows and haven't heard the term, then it probably isn't a common use and could be the latter.