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LANGUAGE HUMOR AT ITS FINEST
Making yourself more proficient in English need not be a drag. You can actually speed up the learning process and make it fun by generously lacing it with humor—but preferably the best that the English language can offer.
In this new section, apart from giving a fixed slot to our weekly “In a Lighter Vein” pop-out humor piece in the Forum homepage, we have put together the finest of those weekly humor pop-ups since the Forum started. The best of them—collected from various sources on the web and sent in by friends—are all here, posted in the Forum under the following headings: Wordplay, On the Job, Student and School Life, and Miscellany.
So if you missed any of the best of the Forum’s weekly humor pop-ups, you can enjoy and savor them again and again here—and better still, share them with your friends!
Click here to go to the board (requires registration to post)
A Profusion of Collective Nouns
There seems to be a collective noun for just about any group—like “a pride of lions,” “a ream of paper,” “a stand of trees,” or “a stack of bibles.” Some are oddly named and imply no quantity—like “a murder of crows.” So wouldn’t it be more logical to call such a group “a crowd of crows?”
At any rate, here, from Jim Wegryn’s “A Barrelful of Words,” are some other collective nouns that would make sense:
A barrel of guns
***
A battery of flashlights
***
A body of morticians
***
A bowl of football games
***
A box of prize fighters
***
A bundle of babies
***
A carload of clowns
***
A case of lawyers
***
A cast of fishermen
***
A closet of acrophobics
***
A collection of churches
***
A company of chaperones
***
A complex of psychoanalysts
***
A crowd of crows
***
A cup of trophies
***
A dash of sprinters
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A deck of cardinals
***
A deck of sailors
***
A division of mathematicians
***
A drove of old cars
***
A fleet of runners
***
A flush of toilets
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A glut of doughnuts
***
A gross of pornographers
***
A hamper of helpers
***
A handful of palmists
******
A hill of beans
***
A host of emcees
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A jar of Quakers
***
A kettle of drums
***
A list of ships
***
A litter of slobs
***
A loaf of bums
***
A lot of car dealers
***
A mass of priests
***
A measure of rulers
***
A mess of army cooks
***
A mound of baseball pitchers
***
A number of counts
***
A pack of suitcases
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A pan of sightseers
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A party of fraternity men
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A peck of chickens
***
A pile of carpets
***
A pinch of pickpockets
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A plethora of pedantries
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A plot of conspirators
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A pot of poker players
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A pound of hammers
***
A purse of kisses
***
A quota of sayings
***
A raft of swimmers
***
A range of stoves
***
A rash of dermatologists
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A ream of bureaucrats
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A round of wheels
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A run of cowards
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A run of noses
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A rush of fraternity men
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A sack of quarterbacks
***
A sack of vandals
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A school of teachers
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A score of musicians
***
A sea of bishops
***
A shower of meteorologists
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A slew of murderers
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A slug of fists
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A spray of cats
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A stack of librarians
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A string of violins
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A sweep of brooms
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A trunk of elephants
***
A volume of speakers
***
A wealth of millionaires
—From Jim Wegryn’s “A Barrelful of Words”
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