Lunch here can be very entertaining at times. Especially on days like today where we didn’t speak about physics at all. Today I learned that the proper plural for a (relatively large) set of crows is a murder of crows. Unexpected, perhaps, but I’m sure there is an illustrious reason for the name of such a collection of birds to be named such. That is not too different from a school of fish or a herd of antelope. Except for the fact that the plural collective sounds more gruesome in the case of crows. Here is a link where you can find a few of these fun plurals. Now, in the spirit of this idea, here are a few suggestions on plurals for professionals:
- A confusion of economists.
- An arrogance of physicists.
- A rabble of politicians.
- A conspiracy of lawyers.
Some suggested a co-set of mathematicians. It doesn’t ring right. I’m still considering what would be the correct way to describe large numbers of accountants ( a book of accountants, perhaps?). Perhaps I could play to stereotypes that accountants are boring, but I couldn’t find something that sounded quite right either. Bring in your witty suggestions. It is especially important to play to stereotypes of professions. Looking especially for fun ways to describe academics of various branches.
Update: it’s a congress of baboons as well. No surprise there.
A strange of string theorists.
And of course, well strung string theorists.
A ledger of accountants?
This is pretty good grasshopper. I like it. It sounds sufficiently convoluted.
A speculation of philosophers?
You forgot “a wunch of bankers”…
A cortet of string theorists. A scheme of Mathematicians!
A strangulation of string theorists.
A stench of string theorists.
Dave:
This is not twitter. Post once or twice svp. And please be a little less repetitive. If you find that your first suggestions is not too much to your liking, take a little while longer before sending a barrage of substitutions. Or post them all in just one reply, all neat and tidy.
A stack of string theorists.
A drone of professors
A snarl of string theorists
An anthill of programmers
A puff of press releases
A blockade of committees
A shackle of status reports
A galley of grad students
A ball of string theorists.
A problem of mathematicians – a solution of mathematicians… oh, oh: a proof of mathematicians! (A lemma of mathematicians?)
A sphere of physicists (spherical cow
)
A collider of physicists (sorry, condensed-matter-people)
A landscape of physicists.
that should be a landscape of string theorists
or a swampland of theorists
An anomaly of physicists (since a lot of physicists together is rare)
A paradigm of physicists
An eccentricity of scientists
A wonder of scientists
A galaxy of astronomers
A proof of mathematicians
okay must stop, too much fun
I like the arrogance of physicists. It’s quite fitting.
A hubris of economists.
A twist of journalists
An extortion of lawyers
An ideal of algebraists?
Sorry, I have probably misunderstood it. But is the task to construct particular sequences of words following the “X of Y” template?
In Czech, that would at least train you to find the right genitive case. But in English?
Hi Lubos:
It is a curiosity of the English language that plurals have so many different ways of being said. The structure of the language is such that it is understood that it is a plural, but the adjectives color the language and give some additional description of the group. All of the above could have been replaced by “A group of” or “A set of”. But there is nothing special about saying it that way.
Dear David,
I see, thanks for your explanation. I hope that the people who read such an explanation are not required to think that “the arrogance of physicists” is the same thing as the “physicists”.
Do I understand well that the “murder of crows” is the only legitimate case among those mentioned above that actually represents a group and nothing else than the group according to a well-established idiom?
Still, the map is not perfect. In Mathematica, the “murder of crows” would have extra curly brackets around it. It is isomorphic to the plural of “elements” being a “set of elements”, right? But a “set of elements” is something different than “elements”. A set of elements is one objects while elements are many objects in general.
From a linguistic viewpoint, a “murder of crows” is a singular, I think, and so are all the other examples.
Thanks,
LM
an equation of mathematicians?
I do love your descriptions of various groups of academics, or professionals if that is a better description. I am not a native English speaker, but I like your language.
Some suggestions:
A drought of bureaucrats
A mystery of diplomats
A puzzle of mathematicians
A sheet of accountants (alternatively an AGgRESSiOn of accountants – referring to the worldly use of the computer program AGRESSO in accounting)
A draft of soldiers
A cannon of generals
A suicide of terrorists???
(If crows can be murder, why not?)
Real fun this is!
Slightly off topic but abstractly related.
What has struck me recently about physics is how central the notions of analysis and synthesis are to the whole endeavor. I would also submit the word compositeness as being descriptive of the quality of our fundamental entities.
In the debate about which type of string theory underpins our universe, it seems likely that we are in fact discussing which basis is most convenient to describe the situation as we observe it. In this sense, all types of strings are equally fundamental to the universe, and all have aspects that are needed to meet our objective of describing our reality.
As pertaining to analysis, we have seen that even those entities that appear fundamental can be decomposed. A good analogy is that of Fourier analysis. Although sines and cosines are fundamental to the fourier series; every sine and cosine can be decomposed into an infinite polynomial of the Taylor series.
What is more important it seems is the notion of minimization. What is important about the Standard Model, is that it represents a minimization of the information needed to describe the composition of the universe. In this sense, it represents a basis that allows for a very low entropy description of our world.
It is compositeness that can help us understand what we mean by fundamental. In a sense, the neutron is by far the most fundamental particle in our universe. Within its composition, we find all of the other fundamental particles of the standard model (at least of one generation), and to give it a stable existence outside an atom would require the use of all fundamental forces (eg the neutron stars provides a region of space were a neutron can remain stable, but only due to the effects of gravity is this achievable). So what the neutron represents is a minimal configuration of the standard model itself, but also one that provides us with an example of symmetry breaking in that it does not represent the lowest energy configuration of the standard model when gravity is weak.
In other words, in the neutron we have an entity that is the maximally composite, lowest entropy and energy particle state of the standard model, which makes it a fundamental entity in our description of the universe.
It may not be satisfying to some, as it goes against the traditional notion of fundamental, but it is a good analogy for concepts such as M-theory, which can also represent the maximally composite, lowest entropy description of the universe itself.
a sheaf of mathematicians
a pile of crackpots