Nevermore

I recently saw a trivia question asking what a group of ravens is called. You may already know that a group of crows is a "murder," which is one of the most famous of the oddball animal group names. But I hadn't heard of a group of ravens before, so I had to look it up. It turns out that a group of ravens is an "unkindness," or a "conspiracy." That's certainly better than my deduction that it's a "manslaughter" of ravens.

What's interesting is that my Google search also turned up this article from the Audubon Society, arguing that it is, in fact, a "group" of crows, ravens, and whatever, since that's what people actually call them. As a birder, he's never used or heard any of the obscure group names, so you can't really say that a group of ravens is called an unkindness, since people in real life call it "a group of ravens." At most, you're just saying that people centuries ago called it by the obscure word. He goes further and asks experts on various animals if they've ever used or heard the group names, and not one had.

Most interestingly, the wombat expert pointed out that wombats don't get into groups, thus begging the question of how anyone devised that they should be a "wisdom" of wombats. I would further point out that although these group names come from the middle ages, no English-speaker set eyes on a wombat until centuries later. So someone out there is just arbitrarily coming up with more of these names, and now has slipped up by including animals that don't group together.

But back to the original idea that these names aren't real. I hadn't really thought about it before, but he's got a point. I mean, here I am, a trivia fan, and yet I've never found the groups of animals interesting, or made much headway in remembering them. I guess that's why; trivia isn't just random info, it has to have at least some importance to be interesting, say, by linking to some other facts. I can remember that the Baltimore Ravens football club is named after the poem because it was written by local boy Edgar Allan Poe. But I'm never going to remember an unkindness of Ravens, even after writing this blog entry about it.

On a similar note, can we lay off the phobia name trivia? I hate it when people ask, "What is 'flentaphobia' a fear of?" I think what you mean is, theoretically, what would it be a fear of if it actually existed. Yes, that's what it theoretically would be called, but just because you can put some Latin roots together, doesn't mean it's an actual thing. I could just say that I have inaniaephobia, the fear of inanity.