What a collection!
Many of you follow Patsy Collins's excellent blog Words about writing and writing about words. (This week she is blogging about the word 'flourish'.) As writers, words are our craft. The English language never fails to amaze me and I love to learn new words. 

Do you know what a group of crows is called? This was a question in last night's pub quiz and no one in our team knew the answer, even though many of us were old enough to have learned lists of collective nouns in school! The answer is........... 

a murder of crows

Isn't that a wonderful term and already I'm thinking where can I use that in a story? I was planning a crime story before I went to the quiz last night and now ideas are coming to me about including a murder of crows somewhere in the story. This morning, I've found out a few facts about crows:

- Crows often feature in European legends or mythology as portents or harbingers of doom or death. This is because of their dark shine black feathers and their unnerving calls. They are commonly thought to circle above scenes of death such as battles.

- They scavenge on carrion, dead animals and garbage. 

- In Chinese mythology, they believed that the world at one time had ten suns that were caused by 10 crows. The effect was devastating to the crops and nature, so they sent in their greatest archer Houyi to shoot down 9 crows and spare only one. Also Chinese people believe that crows mean bad luck, probably due to the colour black.

- Crows feature in Hitchcock's film 'The Birds'. They congregate on the playground outside the school in the yard and when the children are evacuated by their teacher, they attack and injure some of the children.

So many collective nouns are embedded into our every day language. We wouldn't talk about a flock of cows or a herd of sheep, would we, so should we be more accurate when writing about groups of other animals or birds? In my story, Monty the Tabby Cat, I did write about him leading a 'clowder' of cats but as it's not in common usage, I don't know if it sounded a bit contrived. I just loved the word!

Have you used any collective nouns to give your writing accuracy? Which ones are your favourites?

Thanks for reading and please comment. You can also follow me on Twitter @JanBayLit.

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