Venery, Venery, All is Venery! Quiz

Answer: A Parliament

Folklore equates owls with wisdom, so one wonders why a group of owls would be called a parliament. Parliaments, after all, are made up of politicians, and they're not any wiser than the rest of us, in my not so humble opinion.

Answer: Exaltation

The use of "an exaltation of larks" dates back to 1430. Anything that is exalted is high indeed, and larks fly very high. Shelley's famous ode ("Hail to thee, blithe spirit; bird thou never wert...") refers to the high flight of larks and the purity of their sweet song.

Answer: Rafter

Ben Franklin put forward the wild turkey as his choice for the national bird of the new-born United States of America, but that lofty place went to the Bald Eagle. I have no idea why a bunch of turkeys would be referred to as a rafter, but it may have something to do with their propensity for roosting fairly high up in barns.

Answer: Gaggle

A gaggle of geese is the term for the white barnyard fowls, not their wide-ranging wild cousins. I don't know if you've had much to do with gaggles of geese, but avoid them if you can. I speak from bitter experience, having been chased more than once by the vicious members of the gaggle on my uncle's farm, all flapping their wings and hissing at me. Did you know that a blow from a goose wing can break a child's arm? That's what happened to my young cousin. According to Livy, the gaggle of geese that lived within the precinct of the temple of Juno on the Capitoline Hill in Rome once saved the city by raising the alarm when Gauls tried to sack it back in 360 BC.

At Ballantine's whisky distillery on the shores of the Firth of Clyde, the warehouses in which the vats of maturing spirit are stored are guarded by gaggles of Chinese geese, which raise quite a ruckus when anyone comes near their patch.

Answer: Shrewdness

We connect the word shrewdness with wisdom and sagacity, but when this term was coined in the 14th century, shrewdness was a synonym for wickedness or bad behaviour of any kind. Early references to Lucifer describe him as shrewd. To call someone shrewd, therefore, was an insult rather than a compliment in Chaucer's day. Apes are certainly not noted for their good manners.

Answer: Muster

I wouldn't have picked a dull, military-sounding word like 'muster' to describe a group of peacocks - well, okay, maybe peahens, who are pretty drab. The gloriously-coloured peacocks deserve a collective noun like 'an ostentation of peacocks' but muster it is, and muster, no doubt, it will remain.

Answer: Bouquet

Who knows why this floral word is the collective noun for flushed pheasants? The reason is lost in the mists of time. A beater, for those of you not familiar with that term, is a person, usually under the direction of the estate's gamekeeper, who accompanies the hunting party. The beater's job is to literally beat the bushes for pheasant, or whatever small game is under the gun.

Answer: Sloth

Maybe bears got tagged with this synonym for idleness because they tend to amble - it is rare to see a bear move any faster than snail's pace, except when he or she is chasing prey - so they look pretty lazy. It's also pretty rare to see more than one bear at a time, unless it's a sow bear with cubs.

Other veneries give 'sleuth' as the collective noun for bears, but that may be a misprint. The first veneries were handwritten, after all, and we all know that mistakes were made in transcribing the Bible, so why not in veneries?

Answer: Skein

Skein is one of those words that the Vikings brought into English, and it appears to be derived from the old Norse word 'skeg', meaning 'beak' or 'prow of a ship'. (The other meaning of skein which applies to wool is from the Old French 'esceagne', which means a loose knot of wool.) The Lincolnshire holiday resort of Skegness, for instance, derives its name from 'skeg' and 'naes' (meaning 'headland'), which makes it something of a double-double, similar to pizza pie.

A skein of geese, flying in the v-shape certainly has the appearance of both a beak and the prow of a ship.

A skein of geese flying north is one of the sure signs of spring in my part of the world.

Answer: Gam

The use of the word gam for a group of whales dates back to the whaling days of the 19th century, but the word gam itself is a much older word, dating back to the 14th century, meaning fearsome teeth (or tusks) or mouths. Since whales have such enormous mouths, that may be why gam came into being as a collective noun for the leviathans of the oceans. Pod is also a collective noun for whales.

Answer: Bevy

According to my Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology the origin of the word bevy is unknown, but it has been, from at least the Middle Ages, used to describe a group of beautiful women. Swans are certainly beautiful, not to mention elegant, so the collective noun is most appropriate.

Answer: Colony

Rabbits live in warrens (also called burrows). In Norman French, a warenne was a fenced area or pen set aside for the breeding of rabbits, and the person in charge of the warenne was the war(r)en(n)er, a word that survives in surnames today. Colony is just one of a few collective nouns used for rabbits.

Answer: Sounder

This collective noun is of German origin, and originally it meant wild boars only, but domestic swine in groups can also be referred to as a sounder. They can also be called a drift of swine. Drift, evidently, derives from the old Dutch word for herd.

Answer: Scold

We have blue jays in our backyard, and scold is a wonderfully descriptive collective noun for these noisy birds. Jays are inherently territorial birds and the collective noun may well come from their behaviour toward intruders on their patch - they swoop on the poor critter, scolding vociferously, until the other bird or animal gives up and goes away. Our cats won't even go into the backyard in summer time after enduring a few run-ins with the resident blue jays.

Answer: Nest

If you've ever had a nest of mice in your house, you know how hard they can be to dislodge. Mice are communal creatures and live in groups. It seems that as soon as you get rid of one, another takes its place!