BADGERFILES: COLLECTIVE NOUNS–CETE, COTE, CLAN, OR SIGHT?
[Originally posted 11 August 2015] Collective nouns are a curiously eccentric feature of English, whereby evocative or pun-inspired terms are used to describe a group of animals, people, or items. Many of these are common parts of our everyday language–a pride of lions, a murder of crows, a host of angels, a flight of stairs–and have their roots in older vocabulary and terminology that makes sense to etymologists but are often obscure or invisible to…