An Exaltation of Larks or The "Venereal Game" by James Lipton

Introduction

	Most introductions are written in the forlorn expectation that they will be blithely ignored. Not this one. Let me say hastily that this is not an argument for its quality as belles-lettres; nor is its subject arcane; but the terrain we will cover has not been widely traveled and I think a glance through this introductory Baedeker will heighten the traveler's enjoyment of his journey.
	I strongly suspect that the reader's first reaction, after eagerly opening the cover with its nicely provocative (and I swear not really misleading) subtitle, and arriving not in Gomorrah but Academe, is one of disappointment. This is probably not the anticipated venereal game. Still, I hope that I can appease the disgruntled reader with a titillation nearly as satisfying as the expected one.
	This venereal game is played with language (ours) and words (non-four-letter, that once were ours) and, caveat lector!, poetry (that ought to be ours, perhaps). I will begin by quickly admitting that I am not the first explorer in these parts: I see other footprints around me, few and faint, but discernible. Let's begin our journey by following one of these trails. It leads, in a manner of speaking, to Baker Street.
	In 1906, having rid himself once and for all of Holmes and Watson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle returned to the literary form with which he had begun his career fifteen years earlier, producing an historical novel, Sir Nigel. In it the young Nigel comes under the tutelage of Sir John Buttesthorn, the Knight of Dupplin, head huntsman to the King, and England's greatest authority on the hunt. In Chapter XI, the sublimely immodest old knight says to Nigel: "'I take shame that you are not more skilled in the mystery of the woods, seeing that I have had the teaching of you, and that no one in broad England is my master at the craft. I pray you to fill your cup again whilst I make use of the little time that is left to us.'"
	There follows a lengthy disquisition on the chase, "with many anecdotes, illustrations, warnings and exceptions, drawn from his own great experience" and finally the knight says, "'But above all I pray you, Nigel, to have a care in the use of the terms of the craft, lest you should make some blunder at table, so that those who are wiser may have the laugh of you, and we who love you may be shamed.'
	"'Nay, Sir John,' said Nigel. 'I think that after your teaching I can hold my place with the others.'
	"The old knight shook his white head doubtfully. 'There is so much to be learned that there is no one who can be said to know it all,' said he. 'For example, Nigel, it is sooth that for every collection of beasts of the forest, and for every gathering of birds of the air, there is there own private name so that none may be confused with another.'
	"'I know it, fair sir.'
	"'You know it, Nigel, but... none can say that they know all, though I have myself pricked off eighty and six for a wager at court, and it is said that the chief huntsman of the Duke of Burgundy has counted over a hundred... Answer me now, lad, how would you say if you saw ten badgers together in the forest?'
	'A cete of badgers, fair sir.'
	"'Good, Nigel - good, by my faith! And if you walk in Woolmer Forest and see a swarm of foxes, how would you call it?'
	"'A skulk of foxes.'
	"'And if they be lions?'
	"Nay, fair sir, I am not like to meet several lions in Woolmer Forest.'
	"'Ay, lad, but there are other forests besides Woolmer, and other lands besides England, and who can tell how far afield such a knight errant as Nigel of Tilford may go, when he sees worship to be won? We will say that you were in the deserts of Nubia, and that afterward at the court of the great Sultan you wished to say that you had seen several lions... How then would you say it?'
	"...'Surely, fair sir, I would be content to say that I had seen a number of lions, if indeed I could say aught after so wondrous an adventure.'
	"'Nay, Nigel, a huntsman would have said that he had seen a pride of lions, and so proved that he knew the language of the chase. Now, had it been boars instead of lions?'
	"'One says a singular of boars.'
	"'And if they be swine?'
	"'Surely it is a herd of swine."
	"Nay, nay, lad, it is indeed sad to see how little you know... No man of gentle birth would speak of a herd of swine; that is the peasant speech. If you drive them it is a herd. If you hunt them it is other. What call you them then, Edith?'
	"'Nay, I know not.'
	"...'But surely you can tell us, Mary?'
	"'Surely, sweet sir, one talks of a sounder of swine.'
	"The old knight laughed exultantly. 'Here is a pupil who never brings me shame!... Hark ye! only last week that jack-fool, the young Lord of Brocas, was here talking of having seen a covey of pheasants in the wood. One such speech would have been the ruin of a young squire at the court. How would you have said it, Nigel?'
	"'Surely, fair sir, it should be a nye of pheasants.'
	"'Good Nigel - a nye of pheasants, even as it is a gaggle of geese or a badling of ducks, a fall of woodcock or a wisp of snipe. But a covey of pheasants! What sort of talk is that?'"
	What sort indeed! This quotation from Conan Doyle makes, for me, the central point about the first two parts of this book: the terms you will discover here are genuine and authentic; that is, each of them, as fanciful - and even frivolous - as some of them may seem, was at one time either in general use as the only proper term for a group of whatever beast, fish, fowl or insect it designated, (Then, as now, as the quotation from Conan Doyle indicates, one would show truly ludicrous ignorance by referring to a herd of fish or a school of elephants.) or had acquired sufficient local currency to warrant its inclusion in a list with the well-established hunting terms.
	Obviously, at one time or another, every one of these terms had to be invented - and it is equally obvious that much imagination, wit and semantic ingenuity has always gone into that invention: the terms are too full of charm and poetry to suppose that their inventors were unaware of the possibilities open to them, and unconscious of the fun and beauty they were creating. What we have in these terms is clearly the end result of a game that amateur semanticists have been playing for over five hundred years.
	Bear in mind that most of these terms were codified in the fifteenth century, (The Egerton Manuscript, the earliest surviving list of them, dates from about 1450; The Book of St. Albans, the most complete and important of the early lists (and the seminal source for most subsequent compilations), appeared in 1486.) a time when the English language was in the process of an expansion - or more accurately, explosioin - that can only be compared in importance and scope to the intellectual effusions of Periclean Greece or cinquecento Italy.
	The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes as "peculiar to English... the extreme receptiveness of its vocabulary to borrowings from other languages." The inhabitants of the island we now call Britain have always shown an astonishing verbal amenability, a quite childlike open-mindedness to and delight in the new. Elizabeth Drew, Chairman of the Department of English at Smith College, has written about the English language, "... no other can communicate such subtle shades of thought and feeling, such fine discriminations of meaning. The riches of its mingled derivations supply a multitude of synonyms... so that fatherly is not the same as paternal, nor fortune as luck, nor boyish as puerile..."
	I admit to a prejudice toward my own language (and a regrettable inability to read Tolstoi, Dante and the T'ang poets in their original tongues), but I think a good case can be made for English as the preeminent literary language. Compare it to any other, for example, French. Set the starting point of our literary race at the year 1500, the finish-line at 1700. Who shall represent France? - Rabelais, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Jodelle, Montaigne, Malherbe, Corneille, Pascal, Moliere, Ma Rochefoucauld, Boileau, Racine, La Fontaine, Bossuet, Madame de Sevigne and La Bruyere. This list of two hundred years of French literary genius is generous and quite complete. Now, let us handicap English by giving French a hundred years' head start; we will set the English starting line at 1600. In the hundred years that followed it, the English literary genius produced Campion, Donne, Dekker, Beaumont, Lovelace, Jonson, Herrick, Webster, Herbert, Shakespeare, Suckling, Crashaw, Milton, Marvell, Dryden, Bacon, Raleigh, Bunyan, Walton, Pepys, and the forty-seven inspired translators of the King James Bible. (Excluded from the list as a further handicap are such giants as Pope, Defoe and Swift whose major works appeared after 1700)
	I am well aware that this kind of contest is in a sense invidious; how do you compare one writer's genius with another's, Moliere's, for example, with Shakespeare's, or Dante's with Cervantes'? The answer, of course, is that you don't and shouldn't. But the oeuvre of two different periods, or two nations, can be compared, and on this basis I think that the literary production of any nation, ranged alongside English, will suffer by comparison. And, finally, I think that this eminence of English as a literary language can best be explained by the unique flexibility and omnivorous word-hunger of the generations of Britons who forged the uncommonly keen sword wielded by our belletristic heroes.
	An accident of geography played a large part in the process. The British Isle, lying fat and fecund behind a low, beckoning coastline and narrow, unforbidding moat, was an irresistable lure to the peoples of the mainland. The historian G.M. Trevelyan, in his History of England, a book as admirable for its exquisite literary style as for its historiology, says, "The temptation to invade the island lay not only in the pearls, the gold and the tin for which it seems to have been noted... long before the foundations of Rome; temptation lay also in its fertile soil, the rich carpet of perennial green that covered the downs and every clearing in the forest, the absence of long interludes of frost that must have seemed miraculous in a land so far to the North before men knew the secret of the Gulf Stream."
	And with each new wave of traders or invaders came new semantic blood, new ideas and new ways of expressing them. The narrow, languid brook of the Celtic tongue suddenly acquired a powerful tributary as the splendid geometry of the Latin language burst into it, bringing such lofty sounds and concepts as intellect, fortune, philosophy, education, victory, gratitude. From 449 on, the blunt, intensely expressive monosyllables of the Anglo-Saxons joined the swelling stream, giving is the names of the strong, central elements of our lives: God, earth, sun, win, lose, live, love and die. Then, in the eleventh century, with the Norman Conquest, a great warm gush of French sonorities - emotion, pity, peace, devotion, romance - swelled the torrent to a flood-tide that burst its bands, spreading out in broad, loamy deltas black with the rich silt of WORDS.
	It was in precisely this word-hungry, language-mad England that the terms you will encounter in this book were born. They are prime examples both of the infinite subtlety of our language and the wild imagination and verbal skill of our forebears. The terms were codified during the period when the river of words was approaching its greatest breadth, beginning in about 1450 with The Egerton Manuscript.
	These terms and phrases, like the other verbal inventions of their time, were not idle made, but were intended for, and in many cases achieve, wide currency and acceptance. As you will see in Part I of this book, a number of them have down to this day, and are accepted, taken-for-granted figures of speech. What is most remarkable to me about this rich repository of poetry is that all the terms in it can be said to be correct, proper, and usable. The lyrical fanciful Exaltation of Larks has credentials as good as the mundane and universally accepted School of Fish, since both terms offer as provenance the same source, the list in The Book of St. Albans. The fact is that An Exaltation of Larks is the 18th term in the list and A School of Fish is the 132nd. Such whimsies as a Shrewdness of Apes and a Cowardice of Curs also precede the more familiar fish term (109th and 117th). (There are a number of expressions in our contemporary speech that have the form of these terms and obviously derive from the order. We will let one stand for them all: a chorus of complaint.
	So, one can certainly argue with good logic that every one of the terms you will find in the first two parts of this book has an equal claim on our respect and loyalty. The fact that many of them have slipped out of our common speech can only, I think, be described as lamentable. There is little enough poetry in our speech (and lives) to continue to ignore a vein as rich as this. The purpose of this book is to try, in an admittedly modest measure, to redress the balance. The thesis of this book can be summed up very simply: when a group of ravens flaps by, you should, if you want to refer to their presence, say, "There goes an unkindness of ravens." Anything else would be wrong.
	The reader may have noticed that, until this moment, I have avoided giving a single, comprehensive collective term to these collective terms. This is because there isn't any. Oddly enough, the compilers of the numerous lists of these words, though obviously enthusiastic philologists, have never felt compelled to settle on a group term for them. The explorer in this field will find these words variously referred to as "nouns of multitude," "company terms," "nouns of assemblage," "collective nouns," (I hold this to be a misnomer since, obviously, it can be confused with the strictly grammatical term referring to such words as "majority." The same may be saud of "nouns of multitude." "group terms," and "terms of venery." This last seems to me best and most appropriate, and itself warrants some explanation.
	"Venery" and its adjective, "venereal," are most often thought of, of course, as signifying love, and more specifically physical love. From Venus, we have the Latin root ven which appears in the word venari, meaning "to hunt game." Eric Partridge, in his etymological dictionary Origins, asserts that the ven in venari has its original meaning: "to desire (and therefore) to pursue," and he sees a close connection between it and the word "win," from the Middle English winnen, and even the Sanskrit vanoti, "he conquers." It is in this sense that venery came to signify the hunt, and it was so used in all the early works on the chase, including the earliest known on the subject of English hunting, Le Art [sic] de Venery, written in Norman French in the 1320's by the huntsman of Edward II, Master William Twici.
	So, if all the earlier and far greater experts in this field have left it to someone of the twentieth century to select the proper term for these proper terms, I (cautiously and with boundless and well-founded humility) pick up the gauntlet and declare for "terms of venery"; if for no more cogent reason than that it allows of such disingenuous derivative delights as "venereal," "venerealize," and "venerealization" (vide Part III of this book).
	So be it. Henceforward we are talking about terms of venery or venereal terms.
	Before beginning the list of the authentic venereal terms themselves, a word is in order on the various types of terms. Etymologically speaking, the order of venereal terms seems to me to break down into six families, according to the apparent original inspiration for the term. I would list the six families as:

1: Onomatopoeia: for example, a murmuration of starlings, a gaggle of geese.
2: Characteristic: a leap of leopards, a skulk of foxes. This is by far the largest family.
3: Appearance: a knot of toads, a bouquet of pheasants.
4: Habitat: A shoal of bass, a nest of rabbits.
5: Comment (pro or con reflecting the observer's point of view): a richness of martens, a cowardice of curs.
6: Error (resulting from an incorrect transcription by a scribe or printer, faithfully preserved in the corrupted form by subsequent compilers): a school of fish, originally "shoal."

	The preceding six families of venereal terms are my invention. In the lists that follow I will not indicate to which family I would assign each term, preferring to leave it to the reader to decide whether a murder of crows belongs in the second or fifth family. These decisions are proper moves in the venereal game.

	All of the authentic terms you are about to encounter received their first official stamp in the so-called Books of Courtesy, medieval and fifteenth-century social primers, intended, as the quotation from Sir Nigel indicates, to provide a gentleman with the means of social acceptability, and to spare him the embarassment of "some blunder at table, so that those who are wiser may have the laugh of you, and we who love you may be shamed." (William Blades, in his Introduction to the 1881 facsimile edition of The Book of St. Albans, refers to the book's subjects as "those with which, at that period, every man claiming to be 'gentle' was expected to be familiar; while ignorance of their laws and language was to confess himself a 'churl.") The Books dealt with a variety of subjects, but in the largely rural England of that time, the section on the Hunt was doubtless the most important. And in nearly all the Books of Courtesy, the authors saw fit to transcribe a list of the proper, accepted terms of venery. After Egerton (the earliest surviving manuscript, referred to earlier in a footnote), most of the lists were based on previous compilations, always with some omissions, errors and additions. In spite of this variance, each succeeding list gave greater weight of authority to the terms. In the fifteenth century there were several important manuscripts containing lists of terms. In addition to the Egerton, which contained one hundred six terms in its list, there were two Harly Manuscripts, with forty-eight termsin the first and forty-five in the second, The Porkington Manuscript, with one hundred nine, The Digby and The Robert of Gloucester Manuscripts, each with fifty.
	The subject was of such importance that, in about 1476, within a year of the establishment of printing in England, a printed book, The Hors, Shepe, & The Ghoos, appeared, with a list of one hundred six venereal terms. But by far the most important of the early works on the subject was The Book of St. Albans, with its list of one hundred sixty-four terms, printed in 1486 at St. Albans by "the schoolmaster printer."
	The accredited author was, interestingly, a woman, Dame Juliana Barnes, reputedly the sister of Lord Berners and prioress of the nunnery of Sopewell. There has, however, been considerable debate on the subject of Dame Juliana, with some authorities insisting she was a pure invention and others arguing strenuously for her existence. William Blades, a great expert on early English printing, came out staunchly for Dame Juliana in his Introduction to the facsimile edition of The Book of St. Albans. In it he inveighs against most of her biographers for only adding to the mystery with their highly imaginative accounts of her life. At one point an "expert" read her name as Julyan and produced a learned biography of a man. So she remained, writes Blades, until "Chauncy, in 1700 (History of Hertfordshire) restored her sex... and then set to work upon making a family for her. His first discovery was that, being a 'Dame,' she was of noble blood. Finding also that the family name of Lord Berners was, in olden time, spelt occasionally Barnes, he soon supplied a father for our authoress, in the person of Sir James Berners. And so the game of making history went on merrily.... But enough of such sham biography; let us return to facts. The word 'Dame' did not in the fifteenth century... imply any connection with a titled family, it meant simply Mistress or Mrs.... Allowing that Lord Berners' name was sometimes spelt Barnes, is that sufficient reason for making our authoress a member of his family? I think not."
	Having disposed of falsehood, Blades argues for the truth of Dame Juliana's existence, largely from internal evidence in the Book itself, finally commiting himself to the extent of pronouncing her "England's earliest poetess." He allows for the possibility that two parts of the Book, on Hawking and Heraldry, may be the works of the anonymous "schoolmaster printer," but he grants Dame Juliana undisputed authorship of the part on Hunting (the one with which we are concerned).
	Other authorities have held that the entire Book of St. Albans is nothing but a compilation of earlier works and folk material, put together by one or several printers under the collective nom de plume of Dame Juliana. At this distance we cannot decide the matter, and so it seems that Dame Juliana is doomed to suffer the literary fate of Homer (there could be worse). Whether Homer was one blind poet or several generations of nameless bards, and whether Dame Juliana was a lone and quite extraordinary prioress or a plagiary of printers in the fifteenth century, the important fact remains that The Book of St. Albans is the definitive work on the subject at hand, and a fascinating work by any standard. (In 1496, the famous and aptly named Wynken de Worde (the aptness is no coincidence: his real name was Jan van Wynken), successor  to the first English printer, William Caxton, reprinted The Book of St. Albans, and in the sixteenth century there were more than a dozen new editions of the book.) It contains three parts, the first on Hawking, the second on Hunting, and the third on Heraldry. The book on Hawking contains such paragraph headings as "A medecyne for an hawke that has loft here courage." (In this section I have retained the language of the Book, with its f's for s's and its "ys" and "is" plurals, to give some of the flavor of the original. I don't think translation is necessary; the contemporary eye adjusts quickly to the dusk of fifteenth century orthography.) and "The maner how a man fhall put an hawke in to mewe - and that is to be wele nooted."
	The first book ends by assigning certain hawks to certain ranks, thus: "Theys hawes belong to an Emproure... Theis hawkes to a kyng... For a prince... For a duke... For an erle... for a Baron... Hawkes for a knyght... Hawkis for a Squyer (These variant spelling, Theys and Theis, Hawkes and Hawkis, sometimes occuring in the same line of text, are common in early English printing)... For a lady (Each of these headings is followed by a list of the proper hawks, e.g., "There is a Merlyon. And that hawke is for a lady.")... An hawke for a young man," and the section concludes with "And yit ther be moo kyndis of hawkes," listing them, then closes with "Explicit." (An abbreviation of explicitus est liber (the book is unfolded) (from the time when it was in fact a rolled parchment). It usually appears in colophons with the author's name, and is simply a fifteenth-century way of signifying The End.)
	The second book, the one that concerns us, on Hunting, begins with a brief foreword by Dame Juliana: "Lyke Wife as I the booke of hawkying aforefayd..." "Likewise, as in the book of hawking aforesaid are written and noted the terms of pleasure belonging to gentlemen having delight therein, in the same manner this book following showeth to such gentle persons the manner of hunting for all manner of beasts, whether they be beasts of venery, or of chase, or Rascal. (The four beasts of venery were the red deer (hart and hind), hare, boar and wolf. The four beasts of the chase were the fallow deer (buck and doe), fox, marten and roe. C.E. Hare, in The Language of Field Sports, writes that "rascal" originally meant "rabble" or "mob," and that it was a hunting term "applied to all beasts other than the four beasts of venery, and the four beasts of the chase." All three groups were locked in a rigid hierarchic order. Conan Doyle's Knight of Dupplin is firm on the subject: "He spoke also of several ranks and grades of the chase: how the hare, hart, and boar must ever take precedence over the buck, the doe, the fox, the marten and the roe, even as a knight banneret does over a knight, while these in turn are of a higher class to the badger, the wildcat, or the otter, who are but the common populace of the world of beasts.") And also it showeth all the terms convenient as well to the hounds as to the beasts aforesaid. And in certain there may be many diverse of them as it is declared in the book following."
	There follow two septets, a form popularized a hundred years earlier by Chaucer, each comprising three rhymed couplets and an internally rhymed concluding line. The first septet is called "Beftys of venery," the second "Beftys of the Chace."
	The entire book is addressed to "My dere chylde" (in the second line of the opening poem). Further on in the text we encounter such phrases as "Do so, my child." "Think what I say, my son," etc. This maternal tone in the book is one of the most frequently advanced arguments for Dame Juliana's authorship.
	The book continues almost entirely in verse, with such titles as "What is a bevy of Roos grete or fmall" and "the rewarde for howndys." It contains a very long poem called "How ye fhall breeche an hert," with explicit instructions for removing "the finale gutties... the leuer [liver]... and after that the bledder..." and concludes on the recto of sig. tiiij (the 24th page) with "Explicit Dam Julyans Barnes in her boke of huntyng." Though this would seem to end the book, in fact, and to our eternal good fortune, it does not. Because of Dame Juliana's colophon here there has been some argument as to the author ship of the seven pages following it which conclude the book of Hunting and contain, among other things, the famous venereal list. This is one of the principal reasons that the schoomaster printer sometimes shares creative credit with the prioress.
	What ever their authorship, the seven pages contain treatises in both poetry and prose on such subjects as "The propreteis of a goode Grehound" and "The propretees [sic, another example of variant spelling] of a goode hors," followed by a battery of maxims and homilies under the heading "Merke wele theys iiii thynges." One of the things to be marked well is: Too Wyues in oon hous [Two wives in one house], too cattys and oon mous. Too dogges and oon boon: Theis fhall neu accord I oon.
	And then, on the facing recto page, we find the title "The Compaynys of beeftys and fowlys," followed by two vertical columns beginning with "An Herde or Hertis" (harts), and continuing, in fifteenth-century English, through an exhaustive list of one hundred sixty-four venereal terms, some surprising, some amusing, and some arrestingly beautiful. The most startling thing about the list is that not all of the terms in it refer to beeftys and fowlys. Of Dame Juliana's (or the schoomaster printer's) quite astonishing digressions into the realm of poetry and wit, more will be said in Part III of this book. For now, we will confine ourselves to the true and authentic terms of the hunt, compiled not only from the Book of St. Albans but from all the available manuscripts and books on the subject.
	The  list of venereal terms in this book is intended neither as etymology nor zoology. None of these musings pretend to a high order of scholarship. They are at most an innocent summer ramble through unfamiliar fields; any discoveries made along the way are fortuitous and no enlightenment is promised. In fact, the one tree we will probably not encounter is the bodhi. The venereal list that follows is not complete, comprehensive or final. If it is anything more than meets the eye, perhaps it is literary, in the sense that T.S. Eliot once described literature as "the impulse to transcribe one's thoughts correctly." Our language, one of our most precious natural resources in the English-speaking countries, is also a dwindling one that deserves at least as much protection as our woodlands, streams and whooping cranes. We don't write letters, we make long-distance phone calls; we don't read, we are talked to, in the resolutely twelve-year-old vocabulary of radio and television. Under the banner of Timesaving we are offered only the abbreviated, the abridged, the aborted. Our Noble Eightfold Path consists entirely of shortcuts. And what are we urged to do with the time saved by these means? Skim through the Reader's Digest at eighteen hundred words a minute, eating a pre-cooked dinner of condensed soup and reconstituted meat and vegetables on a jet going six hundred miles an hour. Refreshed by our leisurely holiday we can then plunge back into the caucus-race with renewed vigor, dashing breathless behind the Dodo toward an ever-retreating finish-line. Before it is too late I would like to propose a language sanctuary, a wild-word refuge, removed and safe from the hostile environment of our TV-tabloid world.
	Perhaps it is already too late. Under the influence of film and television especially (both valuable but intensely pictorial arts) the picture is finally replacing those maligned thousand words. Soon, if all goes badly, we may be reduced to a basic vocabulary of a few hundred smooth, homogenized syllables, and carry tiny movie projectors and bandoliers of miniaturized film cartridges to project our more important thoughts (too precious to entrust to mere words) in the proper pictorial form on the shirtfront of our conversational partner. Eventually we may be able to press a button on our belt and produce an instantaneous, abstract, psychedelic, atonal, aleatory lightshow that will penetrate straight to the beholder's chromosomes, influencing not only him or her, but logophobic generations yet unborn. Wordless, we will build the new Jerusalem!
	But, for now, while we are still enmeshed in the encumbering toils of language, perhaps this list of terms will slightly expand our means of performing the most difficult feat on earth: transferring one thought from one mind to another. I assume this is an important task, or why else would Eliot be concerned about transcribing his "thoughts correctly," or Dylan Thomas have written, "I hack / This rumpus of shapes / For you to know / How I, a spinning man, / Glory also this star..."? Wordsworth, in the famous Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads in which he formulated the often quoted definition of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility," even had the audacity to describe the poet as "a man speaking to men." Coleridge muttered stubbornly that poetry was "the best words in their best order," and even the angels are on our side (or vice versa), for we find "How forcible are right words" in Job 6:25, and "A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver" in Proverbs 25:11. Hart Crane, in an excess of philological zeal that would have earned him the contempt of some of our contemporary theorists, dared to exclaim, "One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper patterns at the right moment," and in one of the Four Quartets Eliot admits that "Our concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the language of the tribe." High contemporary marks to Mr. Eliot for the tribal reference, but F for preferring speech to macaronic chants and mindblowing mumbo-jumbo.
	It may be argued that our language has in fact grown in the past quarter of a century, at least in two areas: science and slang. Certainly the language of the laboratory and the launching pad has begun to seep into our common speech, and some of the words and phrases we are using freely now have an awesome, transcendental beauty: supersonic, module, cyclotron, transistor, helix, retrorocket, isotope, stereo... even ballistic missile, which, in spite of its ominous significance, has a stunning echoic sound. The majority of the scientific words, however, are still Greek and Latin monstrosities with all the charm and euphony of eccentroosteochondrodysplasia.
	For a short while it looked as though American slang might enrich the language, particularly the sinuous patois of the black American and his mimics, the elective disaffiliates: jazz musicians, beatniks, and hippies. Cool, dig, drag, funky, hip and flip were pungent, useful additions to our speech. More recently the hippies showed some originality and imagination in such small poetic flights as blow your mind, turn on, hangup (which seems a much more expressive word than neurosis or problem), up tight and freak out. There was a nice conscious rhyme in flower power, and the popular songs of this generation have shown some ingenuity and daring in both themes and words. Some of the best recent lyrics of Bob Dylan, Donovan, Jim Webb et al. are stylistically closer to Rimbaud than Tin Pan Alley, and this may be to the good.
	The trouble is that the revolution is in danger of burying itself in a wearying welter of repetition. No sweat and out of sight begin to lose their charm on the fiftieth hearing, and groovy, kicky, wiggy, unreal and wild, by pushing out nearly every other adjective in a generation's speech, don't expand the language, they diminish it.
	Words, said T.S. Eliot, "slip, slide, perish / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still," and Elizabeth Drew (quoted earlier) has written, "Language is like soil. However rich, it is subject to erosion, and its fertility is constantly threatened by uses that exhaust its vitality. It needs constant re-invigoration if it is not to become arid and sterile. Poetry is one great source of the maintenance and renewal of language."
	And the poetry need not come exclusively from poets. In fact, the poet and critic Louis Untermeyer has written, "We cannot escape from poetry. We need its power of quick communication in every casual activity... The very man who belittles poetry in public practices it in private.. His dreams are poetry... his simple sentences rely on the power of imagery... we delight to intensify a hard drizzle by saying 'it's raining cats and dogs'... [A] good servant is not merely rare but 'scarce as a hen's teeth,'... The fruit-grower... capitalizes the power of poetry by saying thiat [his oranges] are Sunkist, a conceit worthy of the Elizabethan singers... The architect daringly suggests the tower of Babel with the 'skyscraper'; the man in the street intensifies his speech by tightening it into slang, the shorthand of the people, by 'crashing' a party, 'muscling' in, 'hitting' the high spots. Language is continually being made swift and powerful through the medium of the poetic phrase."
	So, here are some new candidates for our contemporary lexicon. They are the trophies of what has been, for me, a long and exciting search that began when I realized with a sudden exhiliarating shiver that gaggle of geese and pride of lions might not be just isolated pools of amusing poetic idiosyncrasy but estuaries leading to a virtually uncharted sea, sparkling with found poetry - and intriguing poetic possibilities. Every curious soul has its moment on that peak in Darien. That was mine and it led to these pages.
	I have two hopes: one, that the evangelistic tone of this preface will be forgiven, and, two, that a few of these terms, from Parts I and II - and even from Part III - will stick to our ribs and be ingested into our speech. If they do, it isn't just that we will be able to turn to someone and coolly and correctly say, "Look - a charm of finches." What is more important is that a charm of poetry will have quietly slipped into our lives.

Part I

The Known

	This brief list contains the genuine terms of venery that are still a part of our living speech. They are as old as the other terms that follow, but we still use them, and it is this fact that has led me to separate them from their brothers. They may be so familiar to our ear that we say or read them without thinking; they have lost their poetry for us.
	But stand back for a moment from some of these familiar terms - a plague of locusts, a brood of hens, a litter of pups (plague! brood! litter!) - and perhaps their aptness and daring will reappear.
	So with all the terms in this part: we begin on familiar ground, to sharpen our sense by restoring the magic to the mundane.

A SCHOOL OF FISH

As noted earlier, school was a corruption of shoal, a term still in use for specific fish (vide Part II). C.E. Hare, in The Language of Field Sports, quotes John Hodgkin on this term arguing that school and shoal are in fact variant spellings of the same word, but Eric Partridge, I think correctly, sees them coming from two different roots, the former from ME scole, deriving from the Latin schola, a school, and the latter from the OE sceald, meaning shallow. I think it is obvious that in the lexicon of venery shoal was meant and school is a corruption.

A PRIDE OF LIONS
A HERD OF ELEPHANTS
A FLOCK OF SHEEP
A BAND OF MEN
Hence also band for a group of musicians
A LITTER OF PUPS
A SLATE OF CANDIDATES
Doubtless deriving from the time when nominees' names were chalked on one.
A SWARM OF BEES
A BROOD OF HENS
A HOST OF ANGELS
An interesting term this. J. Donald Adams, in The Magic and Mystery of Words, says, "Angels in any quantity may be referred to only as a host. The word's title to that distinction is clear enough; host derives from the Latin hostis, meaning enemy, and hence came to mean an army. It was presumably applied to angels as the warriors of God."
A BEVY OF BEAUTIES
This is one of the few venereal terms whose origin is uncertain. Partridge marks it o.o.o. - of obscure origin; but hazards the guess that it derives from the Old French bevee, a drink or drinking.
A STRING OF PONIES
A COVEY OF PARTRIDGES
Here is an interesting etymological journey: the Latin cubare means "to be lying down" (both concubine, to be lying down with, and incubate, to be lying down on, also derive from this root). It becomes cover in Old French, whence cove or covy in Middle English. This it refers to nesting habits.
A PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS
A COLONY OF ANTS
A PASSEL OF BRATS
An American term, of course. J. Donald Adams went looking for this one, finding it finally in Wentworth's American Dialect Dictionary  as "hull passel of young ones," "a passel 'o hogs," etc., but no etymology is given. My Southern friends assure me, however, that passel is simply 'parcel' in a regional accent.

PART II

The Unknown

These terms are authentic and authoritative. They were used, they were correct, and they are useful, correct - and available - today.

A MURDER OF CROWS
A KINDLE OF KITTENS
Kin, kindred, and the German Kinder are related to this word from the ME kindlen. To kindle literally means "to give birth."
A COWARDICE OF CURS
A LEAP OF LEOPARDS
A POD OF SEALS
The derivation of this word is obvious, since a pod contans several peas. It was borrowed by sailors to describe groups of seals.
A SLOTH OF BEARS
A RAFTER OF TURKEYS
Probably not what you think, if you see birds sitting on a beam. The term is related to raft in the sense of a "large and often motley collection of people and things, as a raft of books," according to Webster. It is also related to raff, which means a collection of things, and appears in some interesting variations in riffraff and raffish. Remember raff, we will encounter it again.
A PACE OF ASSES
From the Latin passus, a step or stride.
A WALK OF SNIPE
A GAM OF WHALES
A whaling voyage could last as long as three years, so when two whalers encountered each other on some remote sea, it called for a gam, an exchange of crews via whaleboats and the "gamming chair.' It was a happy time for a whaleman and obviously the whales' habit of sporting playfully on the surface of the sea gave rise to this fanciful term.
A NEST OF RABBITS
A GANG OF ELK
A FALL OF WOODCOCKS
A DULE OF DOVES
A corruption of the French deuil, mourning. The soft, sad ululation of the dove has always evoked an association with mourning.
A SKULK OF FOXES
A DISSIMULATION OF BIRDS
A PEEP OF CHICKENS
A BUSINESS OF FERRETS
A PITYING OF TURTLEDOVES
A PADDLING OF DUCKS
on water.
A BEVY OF ROEBUCKS
See earlier note on BEVY OF BEAUTIES. When applied to roes there would seem to be some support for the argument that it stems from the French word for drinking, since roes would frequently be seen together at a watering place.
A CRASH OF RHINOCEROSES
A SIEGE OF HERONS
From the way the heron doggedly waits for its prey in the shallows at its feet.
A BALE OF TURTLES
To my knowledge no one has ever successfully tracked this term to its lair. C.E. Hare suspects that it may be one of the erroneous terms, a corruption of dule, since early scribes sometimes confused turtledoves with turtles.
A HOVER OF TROUT
A HUSK OF HARES
Vide the note on BALE OF TURTLES. This is probably also a member of the sixth family of venereal terms, an error which became the rule.
A LABOR OF MOLES
A SHOAL OF BASS
A RAG OF COLTS
There has been considerable conjecture about this term. It may be related to rage, a word we will encounter later in another context; it may derive from the Old Norse rogg (from whence "rug"), meaning something shaggy (like a colt's coat). Hare conjectures that it is the word that became our word "rack," one of the gaits of a five-gaited horse.
A DRIFT OF HOGS
A TRIP OF GOATS
A very widely used term, given by eighteen authorities. It could come from the Icelandic thrypa, meaning "flock," or it could be a corruption of "tribe."
A CHARM OF FINCHES
A SKEIN OF GEESE
in flight.
A GAGGLE OF GEESE
on water.
A CETE OF BADGERS
Another obscure one. Hare makes the interesting guess that it may be the old Chaucerian word for "city."
A CAST OF HAWKS
A DECEIT OF LAPWINGS
AN OSTENTATION OF PEACOCKS
A DROVE OF CATTLE
A SINGULAR OF BOARS
It seems an odd term for a company, but who are we to argue with Sir John Buttesthorn, the Knight of Dupplin?
A TIDINGS OF MAGPIES
A BOUQUET OF PHEASANTS
A CONGREGATION OF PLOVERS
AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS
A BUILDING OF ROOKS
From their nesting habits.
A RICHNESS OF MARTENS
A HOST OF SPARROWS
See the previous note on angels.
A KNOT OF TOADS
A DESCENT OF WOODPECKERS
A SOUNDER OF SWINE
This is one of those words that suffered some interesting sea-changes hopping back and forth across the English Channel. Originally it was the Old English word sunor, meaning herd. The Norman French adopted it and it became Gallicized to soundre. Since Norman French was the language of all the earliest hunting treatises, and thus the principal source of hunting terms, the word returned to England as sounder, with the English none the wiser that they were borrowing back their own rake. The hunting word "redingote" made a similar trip. The snobbish French affected the English word "riding-coat" which, in their accent, became re-din-goat. The snobbish English, affecting French, heard the word, thought it was French, and took it back across the Channel as redingote, which it has remained to this day.
A MUSTERING OF STORKS
A CLUTCH OF EGGS
A DRAY OF SQUIRRELS
A Middle English word for their nests.
AN ARMY OF CATERPILLARS
A FLIGHT OF SWALLOWS
A CRY OF PLAYERS
The proper venereal term for a troupe of actors in the sixteenth century.
A CLOWDER OF CATS
A truly marvelous venereal term that somehow conveys the essence of cats in a group. Hodgkin, in Proper Terms, says that is is probably the same word as "clutter."
 A WATCH OF NIGHTINGALES
A BARREN OF MULES
The term seems to refer to their sterility, but Hodgkin suspects that barren (or, as it appears in most of the lists, baren) was a corruption of the ME berynge, "bearing," and, in the same sense, The Egerton Manuscript has a "Burdynne of Mulysse."
A SHREWDNESS OF APES
A ROUTE OF WOLVES
In Old French route meant a troop or throng.
A MURMURATION OF STARLINGS
A SPRING OF TEAL
A SMACK OF JELLYFISH
A HARRAS OF HORSES
Hara in Latin meant a pigsty, hence any enclosure for animals.
A PENCIL OF LINES
A proper contemporary group term in mathematics.
A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS
AN EXALTATION OF LARKS

PART III

The Unexpected

	In the Introduction to this book I mentioned "the astonishing digressions into the realm of pure poetry and wit" of Dame Juliana, or the schoolmaster printer, or whoever wrote The Book of St. Albans. As I said, there were one hundred sixty-four terms of venery in that book. You have now read many of them (with the terms from various other sources) in the preceding pages. It will probably surprise you, as it did me, to discver that of the one hundred sixty-four venereal terms in The Book of St. Albans, seventy of them refer not to animals but to people and life in the fifteenth century and every one of these social venereal terms makes the same kind of affectionate or mordant comment that the strictly field terms do.
	By 1486 venereal terms were already a game, capable of codification; and if you think that the social terms were casually intended and soon forgotten, be advised that the second such term in the St. Albans list (it is the ninth term in actual order) is the still very much alive BEVY OF LADIES; and the seventeenth term on the list is none other than A CONGREGATION OF PEOPLE, a true venereal term, coming between A WALK OF SNIPES and AN EXALTATION OF LARKS.
	The social terms are scattered throughout the list, with nothing to distinguish them from the hunting terms. Obviously the compiler considered all the terms equally valid and important to anyone anxious to avoid the title of "churl." The social terms are so surprising, and so filled with wit and revelation, that I would be remiss not to include a number of them in this book. Herewith, some highlights from the venereal game, as it was played in The Book of St. Albans in the year of our Lord 1486.

A HERD OF HARLOTS
A SUPERFLUITY OF NUNS
Henry VIII was as yet unborn, but the ground was obviously fertile for his quarrel with Rome.
A SCHOOL OF CLERKS
A CONVERTING OF PREACHERS
A DOCTRINE OF DOCTORS
A SENTENCE OF JUDGES
A DILIGENCE OF MESSENGERS
Any doubt that these social terms had wide currency should be dispelled by the recollection that, in more recent times, a fast coach was still called "a diligence."
A STATE OF PRINCES
A HOST OF MEN
See the earlier note on HOST OF ANGELS.
A ROUTE OF KNIGHTS
See the previous note on ROUTE OF WOLVES.
AN IMPATIENCE OF WIVES
A PRUDENCE OF VICARS
AN OBEISANCE OF SERVANTS
A SET OF USHERS
A DRAUGHT OF BOTTLERS
A PROUD SHOWING OF TAILORS
A TEMPERANCE OF COOKS
A STALK OF FORESTERS
A BOAST OF SOLDIERS
A LAUGHTER OF HOSTLERS
A CAJOLERY OF TAVERNERS
The vast and comprehensive New English Dictionary defines glozing as "flattering, cajolery," and gives as one of its definitions, "3. An alleged name of a 'company' (of taverners) 1486 Bk. St Albans Fvi b, A Glosying of Tauerneris," which is how the term appears in the list.
AN IMPERTINENCE OF PEDDLERS
A THRAVE OF THRESHERS
Under "thresher" the NED quotes "A Thraue of Throsheris" from St. Albans, and defines thrave as "Two shocks of corn."
A SQUAT OF DAUBERS
Daubers repaired walls and fences and the term obviously refers to their working position.
A FIGHTING OF BEGGARS
AN UNTRUTH OF SUMMONERS
A MELODY OF HARPISTS
A POVERTY OF PIPERS
In the fifteenth century it was obviously wiser to take up the harp than the pipes.
A NEVERTHRIVING OF JUGGLERS
Obviously they had it no better than the pipers.
A SUBTLETY OF SERGEANTS
This term confused me greatly: of the sergeants I have known, very few were subtle, and I couldn't believe human nature had changed that radically in only five hundred years. And so I began a slow search through dusty library stacks for the secret behind a sotelty of sergeauntis. I found it at the end of a very long list of definitions in an exceptionally must volume. "Sergeant," the book said, was "a title borne by a lawyer." Case dismissed.
A DRIFT OF FISHERMEN
A BLACKENING OF SHOEMAKERS
This one was thorny too. What Dame Juliana said was a Bleche of sowteris. I found this singularly unilluminating, but another trek through the atheneal dust revealed that sowters were shoemakers and that bleche meant either "bleach" or "blacken" (from the OE blaeccean). I opted for "blacken." It may have been the dust.
A SMIRK OF COURIERS
The original is a Smere of Coryouris. To "laugh smere" is to laugh lightly, mockingly. "Smirk" is derived from it.
A CLUSTER OF GRAPES
Yes, a genuine venereal term, codified 500 years ago.
A CLUSTER OF CHURLS
AN EXAMPLE OF MASTERS
A RAGE OF MAIDENS
In the note on rag of colts I indicated that we would re-encounter the term in a different context. Here it is, meaning not "anger" but "wantonness," from the OF ragier. A rather sad commentary on fifteenth-century maidenhood - or the want of it.
AN INCREDULITY OF CUCKOLDS
This splendid venereal term also inspired some interesting digging - that led to fascinating provenances. It appears in the list as an vncredibilitie of Cocoldis, which doesn't seem to make much sense: cuckolds have good reason to be incredulous, but no one doubts their existence, which vncredibilitie would seem to imply. I assumed that somehow, at some time, "incredibility" must have meant "incredulity" as well and so translated it. Then I began a diffident search for some kind of confirmation. I was astonished to find that the NED, under uncredible, gave the expected "incredible" as its first definition, but the definitely unexpected "incredulous" as its second. I had been instinctively right - and now I had proof. What was my proof? The magisterial, multi-tomed New English Dictionary says so. But even the NED must support its views, and whom does Dr. Murray offer as his authority? Dame Juliana! "Incredulous," says the NED, and points for proof to "1486 Bk. of St. Albans f vi b, An vncredibilitie of Cocoldis." The logic is suspiciously circular, and it's a bit like being offered your own watch as collateral, but I think I'm ready to settle.
A RIFFRAFF OF KNAVES
Here is another term we have encountered before. In an earlier note I suggested that you remember raff. The moment has come to resurrect it. This term appears in the St. Albans list as a Rafull of knauys. The NED refers you from 'rafull' or 'rayful' to 'raffle,' and we are back to our root raff, obviously a very popular word in the fifteenth century. This time we are told that "raffle" had as one of its meanings, riffraff, and we have our translation.
AN ELOQUENCE OF LAWYERS
A FORESIGHT OF HOUSEKEEPERS
A SKULK OF THIEVES
A PONTIFICALITY OF PRELATES
AN OBSERVANCE OF HERMITS
AN EXECUTION OF OFFICERS
A FAITH OF MERCHANTS
Clearly meant sarcastically.
A SAFEGUARD OF PORTERS
A GAGGLE OF WOMEN
A CUTTING OF COBBLERS
The key to this term also lay at the end of a rather tortuous, labyrithinian path, and, on the theory that the reader isn't too exhausted to make one more expedition with me back to the fifteenth century, I will retrace my steps. the Book of St. Albans was printed just ten years after the date that is generally taken as the dividing line between Middle and Modern English, and, to the inexpert eye, some of these terms can appear impenetrable. Take this one: what would you make of a Trynket of Corueseris? Well, you would begin with Corueseris. The "is," you know, is a fifteenth-century plural form. And you take the "u" for a "v" because it makes more sense euphonically. Now you have the singular "corveser," and this is where you begin in the NED, which says that "corveser" is a variant of "corviser." Very well, you move on to "corviser" and search through all the orthographic shapes it has taken through the centuries, coming finally to "corueseris, from F. courvoisier, shoemaker." We seem to have half our term, but why a trynket? Quickly enough you discover that the NED has "tryn" as a variant spelling of "trin," and then you come to the coup de foudre. Under "trinket" the NED says: "From the similarity of form, it has been suggested that this is the same word as Trenket, or trynket, a small knife, spec. a shoemaker's knife." Eureka.
AN ILLUSION OF PAINTERS
This term is Misbeleue which, according to the NED, has more the sense of 'erroneous belief" than "refusal to believe"; hence "illusion" in the sense of "trompe-l'oeil." The NED also gives the term, in its original orthography, as a "term for a 'company of painters."
A LASH OF CARTERS
A WAYWARDNESS OF HERDSMEN
A DIGNITY OF CANONS
A CHARGE OF CURATES
A DISCRETION OF PRIESTS
A SKULK OF FRIARS
AN ABOMINABLE SIGHT OF MONKS
The Church was doing something wrong in England. If Pope Clement had read The Book of St. Albans England might be Catholic today!
A BLAST OF HUNTERS
A THREATENING OF COURTIERS
A PROMISE OF TAPSTERS
A LYING OF PARDONERS
A GORING OF BUTCHERS
A SCOLDING OF SEAMSTRESSES
A WANDERING OF TINKERS
A DRUNKENNESS OF COBBLERS
The term in St. Albans is Dronkship. Says the NED: "Drunkship-DRUNKENNESS. b. a drunken company 1486 Bk. of St. Albans F vij, a dronkship of Coblers."	
A CLUSTER OF KNOTS
A RASCAL OF BOYS
Vide the earlier note on rascal.
A DISWORSHIP OF SCOTS
A WORSHIP OF WRITERS
Probably a reference to the reverence of writers for their patrons and not, alas, vice versa.

So you see, by 1486 the venereal game was already in full swing. There are examples of it in most of the early manuscripts. The first Harley Manuscript gives gaggle of gossips, and the very early book The Hors, Shepe, & The Ghoos contributes a pity of prisoners and a hastiness of cooks. The extreme importance of these books in the fifteenth century is indicated by the fact that the last named was one of the first printed by William Caxton in the year that he introduced printing to England. And if we are still inclined to think of the social terms of venery as frivolous, C.E. Hare asserts that a blast of hunters and its fellows "were all probably in use at one time or another." There is of course no law or canon of usage that gives any of these terms sole possession of the field, but clearly they were once considered well enough establish to take their places with a flock of sheep and a school of fish.
	But, that the codifiers of these terms knew they were playing a word game is equally clear, from the terms themselves - and the history of the game in the centuries since Caxton. It has never stopped. The reader of this book may already know the popular philological story that usually takes Oxford as its local. In it, four dons, each representing a different academic discipline and therefore a different viewpoint, were flapping along the Oxford High when their path was crossed by a small but conscpicuous group of prostitutes. The quickest of the dons muttered, "A jam of tarts." The second, obviously a fellow in Music, riposted, "No, a flourish of strumpets." From the third, apparently an expert on nineteenth-century English literature, came, "Not at all... an essay of Trollope's." The fourth - Modern English Literature - said, "An anthology of pros." (I have heard versions that included "a peal of Jezebels," "a smelting of ores" and even "a troop of horse," but this begins to be flogging a dead one.)
	Besides, the dons' venereal terms, as brilliantly constructed as they are, seem to me to obscure the point of the venereal game by drawing attention to both ends of the phrase; that is, not only to the term, "anthology," but its object, already a synonym, "pros." What we are admiring is the verbal dexterity and ingenuity; what emerges is not poetry but a joke, not revelation but a chuckle.
	There has, of course, through the long history of the game, always been the temptation to make a joke of it, and sometimes the temptation is irresistable. I began playing the venereal game long before I knew that Dame Juliana (or anyone else) had. For a few euphoric days I thought I had invented it. And I have often been tempted by the punning aspect of the game, as when I decided that a group of male homosexuals should be known as "a charm of fairies," "a basket of fruit," "a bundle of faggots" (in England, "a packet of fags"), "a board of trade," or "a burrow of Queens." Though I'm rather pleased with some of these terms as verbal machinery, I have ended by striking them en masse from the list that follows. For me they fail to qualify for the same reason as those of the illustrious dons.
	Having taken this high-handed attitude toward what a venereal term is not, I suppose it is incumbent upon me to try to explain as briefly and precisely as I can what I think it is. First of all, obviously, I think it is poetry. Robert Frost wrote, "There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another." (Italics mine.)
	Certainly, by this definition the venereal terms are the essence of poetry, the "chiefest" thing, for they are unalloyed metaphor. More specifically, most of them are synechdochic in form, letting a quintessential part (pride, leap, gaggle, skulk) stand for the whole, giving us large illuminations in small flashes.
	My principal objection to the dons' terms, and my "charm of fairies," etc., is that they do not say "one thing in terms of another"; they say two things, both "essay" and "Trollope's"; and lost in admiration for the double double entendre (quadruple entendre?), we lose poetry and illumination too. We have witnessed some verbal sleight-of-hand; but "anthology" and "jam" tell us nothing about whores, and that is, or should be, the purpose of the game. At least it is in the best examples I can think of, e.g., A PARLIAMENT OF OWLS - "parliament" tells us something, it gives us a valuable quiddity of owls.
	My position on this is, of course, much too dogmatic. A joke may illuminate, and you will find a number of them that I couldn't resist in the list that follows. The only reason I have emphasized this point is that one of the basic rules of the venereal game is that it is the term that matters. In an exaltation of larks, "exaltation" is the operative word. If "larks" had been turned into a synonym that made a jeu de mots of the whole phrase, I feel that more might have been lost than gained.
	In some cases, as perhaps in "a flourish of strumpets," we seem to have both a joke and revelation, but, for me, "an anthology of pros" stands somewhere outside the venereal game, the goal of which, I feel, is to tell us something quintessesntially true about the term's object - something we failed to notice or took for granted until that moment. The term of venery is a searchlight that illuminates something for us, letting us see it with fresh insight, or as if for the first time.
	If you join in the venereal game - and by now it must be nakedly apparent that this book is an invitation to - you will probably find that your first attempts are almost all alliterative (like gaggle of geese).
My advice, for what it is worth, is to fight that impulse. If the proper, poetic, illuminating term happens to be alliterative with the group it is describing, well and good; but if it is not, nothing is lost, and there may be a clearer focus on the main thing: the term, with its gingery secret. In the venereal game, as in the arts, simplicity is the goal and distillation is the way. "Omission," Lytton Strachey wrote in 1912, "is the beginning of all art."
	Since the venereal game has been going on for more than five hundred years, there have been a great number of players. C.E. Hare, in his Language of Field Sports, assembled a long list of contemporary venereal terms from various sources, and some of them deserve repetition: AN OBSTINANCY OF BUFFALOES, A BASK OF CROCODILES, A TOWER OF GIRAFFES, A POMP OF PEKINGESE, A CONDESCENSION OF ACTORS, A DEBAUCHERY OF BACHELORS, AN ERUDITION OF EDITORS, AN UNEMPLOYMENT OF GRADUATES, AN UNHAPPINESS OF HUSBANDS, AN EXAGGERATION OF FISHERMEN and A WOBBLE OF BICYCLES.
	In a recent issue of the Bulletin of the Mensa Society, a doctor in California cut through the whole medical profession, coming up with such contemporary venereal terms as A BRACE OF ORTHOPEDISTS, A JOINT OF OSTEOPATHS, A RASH OF DERMATOLOGISTS, A FLUTTER OF CARDIOLOGISTS, A GUESS OF DIAGNOSTICIANS, A PILE OF PROCTOLOGISTS, A CORPS OF ANATOMISTS and A SMEAR OF GYNECOLOGISTS.
	The list that follows consists of the terms of venery that I have coined or encountered since I first began unearthing these shards of poetry and truth. I hasten to acknowledge that some of the terms are not mine. As I played the venereal game, like Tom Sawyer whitewashing his fence, I found that spectators didn't stay spectators long. If you should feel the urge, there are more brushes in the pail.

A TRANCE OF LOVERS
A PIDDLE OF PUPPIES
A TRIP OF HIPPIES
A SLOUCH OF MODELS
A FLUSH OF PLUMBERS
A WINCE OF DENTISTS
A LURCH OF BUSSES
AN ESCHEAT OF LAWYERS
A WRANGLE OF PHILOSOPHERS
A SNEER OF BUTLERS
A DISAGREEMENT OF STATESMEN
A CRUNCH OF WRESTLERS
A STRING OF VIOLINISTS
A BABBLE OF BARBERS
AN ACNE OF ADOLESCENTS
A NERVE OF NEIGHBORS
A MERDE OF CANICHES
AN ODIUM OF POLITICIANS
A POUND OF PIANISTS
A SHOWER OF METEOROLOGISTS
AN INDIFFERENCE OF WAITERS
A BLOAT OF HIPPOPOTAMI
A SWISH OF HAIRDRESSERS
AN INTRUSION OF COCKROACHES
A COLUMN OF ACCOUNTANTS
A SAMPLE OF SALESMAN
A FUMBLE OF CHECKGRABBERS
A FROST OF DOWAGERS
A WHINE OF CLARINETISTS
A CONJUNCTION OF GRAMMARIANS
A LEER OF BOYS
A GIGGLE OF GIRLS
A FLAP OF NUNS
A DASH OF COMMUTERS
A STUD OF POKER PLAYERS
A MUTTER OF MOTHERS-IN-LAW
A MASS OF PRIESTS
A MADDER OF PAINTERS
A PUREE OF STRAPHANGERS
A GOGGLE OF TOURISTS
A DELIRIUM OF DEBUTANTES
A PRANCE OF EQUESTRIANS
AN AROMA OF BAKERS
A CAPER OF KIDS
A TRINE OF ASTROLOGERS
A BELLYFUL OF BORES
A SLAVER OF GLUTTONS
A RISE OF MINISKIRTS
A SAUNTER OF COWBOYS
A PRATFALL OF CLOWNS
A NUCLEUS OF PHYSICISTS
A PUMMEL OF MASSEURS
A RING OF JEWELERS
AN UNCTION OF UNDERTAKERS
An even larger group:
AN EXTREME UNCTION OF UNDERTAKERS
A FLOAT OF DANCERS
female.
A FLIT OF DANCERS
male.
A SHRIVEL OF CRITICS
A SHUSH OF LIBRARIANS
A HACK OF SMOKERS
A DELICATESSE OF GOURMETS
A DELICATESSESN OF GOURMANDS
AN OHM OF ELECTRICIANS
A SONG OF SIT-INS
A GULP OF CORMORANTS
A STAND OF FLAMINGOES
A FAMILY OF BIOLOGISTS
A PROFIT OF GURUS
AN OGLE OF OFFICE BOYS
A STORE OF GYPSIES
A TANTRUM OF DECORATORS
A COLLOID OF CHEMISTS
A LOAD OF DRUNKS
In England:
A STONE OF DRUNKS
A HAGGLE OF VENDORS
A CURSE OF CREDITORS
A SLUMBER OF OLD GUARD
A PORTFOLIO OF BROKERS
A SKIRL OF PIPERS
A WIGGLE OF STARLETS
A PINCH OF PRODUCERS
A STRANGLE OF CITY-DWELLERS
A TABULA RASA OF CLASSICISTS
A MEWS OF CATHOUSES
A SPRINKLING OF GARDENERS
A CONCATENATION OF ORGIASTS
A PARLAY OF HORSEPLAYERS
A CLICK OF PHOTOGRAPHERS
A NO-NO OF NANNIES
A SCORE OF BACHELORS
A PALLOR OF NIGHTWATCHMEN
A BUZZ OF BARFLIES
A CONSTERNATION OF MOTHERS
A THRILL OF FANS
A GRAFT OF TREE SURGEONS
A SLANT OF JOURNALISTS
A CHARGE OF TAXIS
A SCHREI OF HELDENTENOREN
A RUMBLE OF BASSES
A QUAVER OF COLORATURAS
A SHRIEK OF CLAQUES
A RECESSION OF ECONOMISTS
A PAVANNE OF MATADORS
A LEAP OF BANDERILLEROS
A COMPLEX OF PSYCHOANALYSTS
A BROOD OF CHESSPLAYERS
A TORQUE OF MECHANICS
A HORDE OF MISERS
AN ENTRANCE OF ACTRESSES
AN AMBUSH OF WIDOWS
A MESS OF OFFICERS
A PARENTHESIS OF CELLISTS
A PERSISTENCE OF PARENTS
AN INGRATITUDE OF CHILDREN
A FAILING OF STUDENTS
A DILATION OF PUPILS
(after Dr. Leary)
A TRANSPLANT OF SUBURBANITES
A CONGLOMERATE OF GEOLOGISTS
A BLARNEY OF BARTENDERS
This is simply a contemporary translation of St. Alban's A Glosyng of Tauerneris, q.v. in the introduction to this section, in the note to A CAJOLERY OF TAVERNERS.
A DROVE OF CABDRIVERS
AN IAMB OF POETS
A BROW OF SCHOLARS
A TWADDLE OF PUBLIC SPEAKERS
A SUNBURN OF VACATIONERS
AN EXPLOSION OF ITALIANS
A GROSS OF GERMANS
A PECK OF FRENCHMAN
A POUND OF ENGLISHMEN
A PINT OF IRISHMEN
A FIFTH OF SCOTS
AN INVASION OF ISRAELIS
A FLIGHT OF ARABS
A DESCENT OF RELATIVES
AN OVERCHARGE OF REPAIRMEN
A GALAXY OF ASTRONOMERS
A PLENTITUDE OF VENEREAL TERMS

Explicit
James Lipton
in
Exaltation of Larks