Know Your Animal Names

This week, in a blatant violation of all prior precedent, my crew at work was forced to change our Chinese Lunch Tuesday into the highly suspect Chinese Lunch Friday. I suppose there was a decent enough reason, what with the dog n’ pony show that went on this week (and the unwelcome restroom changes that accompanied it), but still, tradition is tradition for a reason, dangnabbit!
CLT consists of a whole load of engineers (anywhere between 6 and 12, generally) piling into the cars of those foolish enough to own anything larger than a coupe and heading off to a local Chinese restaurant whose food is, well, not the best, but the prices are good and they know us well. We usually take posession of the restaurant’s single large, round table and hold forth on all manner of subjects, from politics to literature to drainage solutions for those with sub-watertable basements. It always makes for a good time and has been the genesis of several of the best Prosenfeldisms on record.
Today, we got into a discussion about the official names for groups of animals and, as is generally the case, it resulted in several trips to Google in order to pin down some of the finer points/fill in some of the gaps in our collective knowledgebase, such as “What do you call a group of geese?” “Answer: it depends what they’re doing at the time”. Google yielded many results, the most fruitful of which was this one. What follows are, in no particular order, my favorite animal group names:

• A battery of barracudas.
• A wake of buzzards.
• A crossing of zebras.
• An ambush of tigers.
• A gulp of swallows.
• A scurry of squirrels.
• A clamor of rooks.
• A parliament of owls.
• A nuisance of cats.
• A cackle of hyenas.

I am also more than a little disturbed by the following:

• A flange of baboons.
• A quiver of cobras.
• A lap of cod. [ Ummm, what? -ed. ]
• An intrusion of cockroaches.
• An army of frogs. NOTE: “Army of Frogs” would make an excellent name for a band.
• A smack of jellyfish.

Now, I’ve just got to set about coming up with names for groups of engineers. I think it may ultimately depend on what they’re doing at the time…