trout fishin' ravens

"Willi" wrote in message
...


B J Conner wrote:


A group of crows is not a flock but a "murder".

Anyone know the derivation of that?

Willi


Willi

Wrote:

Anyone know the derivation of that?

Maybe because of their association with dead things? Possibly a once
existing misconception that the crows themselves were responsible for the
deaths of the carrion with which they were associated?

Although it does not answer the question, there is an interesting web-site
that discusses the origins of representing groups of animals through the use
of collective nouns: http://en2.wikipedia.org/wilki/collective_noun

Snakefiddler-

Wolfgang wrote:
"Willi" wrote in message
...


B J Conner wrote:



A group of crows is not a flock but a "murder".

Anyone know the derivation of that?


I do. But I'm not telling cuz you were mean to me.

"The phrase, according to James Lipton in his An Exaltation of Larks,
dates from 1450 in the form a mursher of crowys. It was a murther of
crowes by 1476. Whether it arose because murdering was thought to be a
characteristic of crows or simply as a negative comment upon flocks of
crows is not known. The mursher form is problematic, however, as we
must wonder if it was not intended as murder but was mistakenly
interpreted as such."

http://www.takeourword.com/TOW173/page2.html

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