原创 Collective names: A charm of CPUs & a deceit of DSPs

I was just thinking about animal collective nouns (as one does). I was thinking that, on the one hand, we humans do tend to over-complicate things on occasion; on the other hand, we also tend to make the world a richer place in many ways.

When it comes to animals, for example, we could have simply picked a single word like "bunch" and then used it to apply to any group of animals, such as "a bunch of birds" or "a bunch of fish" or "a bunch of worms." This would, of course, have made our lives a lot simpler.

Alternatively, if we wanted to take things to the next level, we could have picked different words to cover each main group of animals. In the case of our feathered friends, for example, we could use "flock" for everything, such as "a flock of birds" or "a flock of chickens" or "a flock of penguins." Similarly, in the case of land-bound mammals, we could use "herd" for most of them, such as "a herd of cows" or "a herd of buffalo" or "a herd of zebra."

But this would have been far too simple, wouldn't it? (Also it would have prevented us from using phrases like "a gaggle of wives" or "a jerk of husbands.") The end result is that we've come up with different names for all sorts of groups of creatures. Further confusing the issue is that fact that, in many cases, we have multiple names for the same creatures (e.g., a tribe, trip, drove, herd, or flock of goats; a team, harras, stable, troop, or stud of horses; an exaltation or ascension of larks; and a herd, pod, school, crowd, or shoal of porpoises). A few collective names I particularly like are as follows:

* A raft of auks
* A plump of (game) birds
* A clowder of cats
* A fling of dunlins
* A memory of elephants
* A fesnyng of ferrets
* An implausibility of gnus
* A bloat of hippopotamuses
* A rabble of insects
* A smack of jellyfish
* A mob of kangaroos
* A lounge of lizards
* A mischief of mice
* A watch of nightingales
* A romp of otters
* A pandemonium of parrots
* A covey of quail
* A crash of rhinoceroses
* A walk of snails
* A posse of turkeys
* A kettle of vultures
* A wisdom of wombats
* A dazzle of zebras
All of this leads me to pose three questions as follows:

1. My list above includes a different type of animal for each letter of the alphabet apart from "u," "x," and "y." Do you know any interesting names for groups of animals whose names start with these letters?ÿ

2. The collective names I show about are the ones that "tickle my fancy"; are there any others that you particularly like?ÿ

3. I was wondering about coming up with collective names for different types of silicon chips, such as CPUs, MCUs, DSPs, SRAMs, op-amps, ADCs, DACs, and so forth. Do you have any suggestions?

Why do I spend my time contemplating stuff like this? I have no idea. All I know is that things like this are popping in and out of my head all the time. "Thank goodness for the dried frog pills," is all I can say.

For more of these collective names, click here.