The North American Venerilogical Association

On the Matter of Origins

The Association was founded, as all important institutions are, by a single person standing in a garden looking at something and asking a question no one had adequately answered. In this case: a rose bush in full riot, and the question of what to call the whole magnificent mess of it. A bunch seemed insufficient. A bouquet implied cutting. A cluster was doing its best but falling short. Surely, someone had thought about this.

They had not. Or if they had, they hadn't written it down anywhere findable.

The venery tradition — the naming of collective groups, from a parliament of owls to a murder of crows — dates to the fifteenth century. The Book of Saint Albans (1486) catalogued terms for hunting game with the exhaustive enthusiasm of a person who had clearly never been invited to enough parties. The animals got named. Everything else was left to fend for itself.

The North American Venerilogical Association exists to correct this oversight. Not just for animals. For everything. For roses on the bush and roses in a vase. For the mushrooms, the mosses, the medieval weapons, the drawing room objects, the things currently trending on the internet. For all of it. The world contains multitudes, and multitudes deserve names.

On the Question of Authority

The Association does not appoint terms by committee. We tried that. It was slow and the sandwiches were poor. Instead, we put the matter to a democratic vote — a process the fifteenth century had not yet invented, which is perhaps why their terms were so authoritative and ours are so entertaining.

Every term in our Registry has been submitted by a member of the public and ranked by the collective judgment of our visitors using an ELO rating system, the same algorithm used to rank chess grandmasters and, one assumes, to settle certain arguments about pizza toppings. The highest-ranked term for any given noun is, by definition, the one the people have chosen. Whether the people are right is a separate question and not one the Committee is prepared to answer at this time.

You may also nominate your own terms. The Committee asks only that they be offered in the spirit of genuine nomenclatural inquiry, or at minimum, a sincere appreciation for the absurd.

On the Matter of Mirth

The Association holds that the world contains insufficient quantities of wit and whimsy, and that this is a correctable problem. We are not under the impression that naming things fixes anything. We are, however, under the impression that naming things well is a small act of resistance against dullness, and that dullness is among the more preventable afflictions of the age.

A good collective noun does something a dictionary definition cannot: it makes you see the thing slightly differently. A conspiracy of lemurs. An unkindness of ravens. A parliament of owls. These are not merely labels — they are small, compressed observations about the nature of the things they name. The Association is in the business of generating more of them, for more things, with the assistance of the voting public and a great deal of good humor.

On Future Endeavors

The Registry currently contains entries for flowers, trees, herbs, mushrooms, mosses, fruits, vegetables, weather phenomena, aquatic curiosities, correspondence, drawing room objects, tools, transport, medieval artifacts, and a selection of items currently in the news. This is, the Committee acknowledges, not everything. There is more work to be done.

If you are a person of wit, technical ability, or unreasonable enthusiasm for collective nouns, the Association would be glad to hear from you. We are, in the manner of all worthy institutions, perpetually in need of good collaborators and occasionally in need of better sandwiches.

The Association may be reached by submitting a term, which is how we know you have found the place.