An "Annoyance" of Collective Nouns

In conversation with my wife yesterday evening, the subject of collective nouns came up. I think she was trying to remember whether there is a collective noun for owls.

Anyway, off we went, recalling the familiar ones: a flock of sheep, a herd of cattle, a pride of lions, a pack of wolves, a school/shoal of fish, a pod of dolphins, a swarm of bees, a skein of geese (flying) or a gaggle of geese (on the ground).

Then we started digging out the more obscure ones: a murmuration of starlings, a murder of crows, a parliament of owls ...

In fact, we discovered that there are hundreds of collective nouns. And as we trawled through them, I found myself feeling irritable, which was simultaneously annoying (obv) and interesting. What was that about?

As I see it, there's a number of collective nouns that are part of normal, natural everyday speech for an educated anglophone (see the familiar ones in paragraph 2).

Then there's a grey area of collective nouns for things that rarely crop up in normal conversation. I find them a bit smarty pants - a bit QI smug - but I accept that they are used.

Then there's the huge list of obscure ones that really bug me. Who has decided that it's a parenthesis of cellists or a ring of jewellers?

I was curious, so I checked. I didn't know the answer beforehand.

Parliament of owls, murder of crows, exaltation of larks and other bird collectives come from the Book of St Albans (1486), a book of venery attributed to Dame Juliana Berners: a real medieval hunting-and-heraldry tradition. They were originally coined, sometimes with humorous intent, but they have centuries of actual use behind them. They entered the language because people kept using them.

Contrast that with the parenthesis of cellists, ring of jewellers, and the rest, which come from James Lipton's An Exaltation of Larks (1968). He framed them openly as a game. Part of the collection was his own invention, part contributed by readers playing along with earlier editions. Nobody involved claimed that these were in circulation. They were jokes, not reports.

The difference that matters is this: an expression is real because a speech community uses it. The medieval bird names survived because people actually used them. Lipton's playful inventions mostly didn't. They were never really spoken; they were written down or trotted out as a party trick. Decades of listicle content have stripped away the "this was a joke" context and repeated them with the flat, sourceless authority of a dictionary entry. Or the QI elves.