To the chase! To the hunt!

As editors we often hunt for just the right word. We’ll chase through bogs and marshes to snare elusive terms. James Lipton’s An Exaltation of Larks: The Ultimate Edition lists more than a thousand terms of venery, an archaic word for “the hunt.”

Some were first recorded in the 1400s (a murder of crows, a clowder of cats) and some are of recent coinage (a WYSIWYG of computer programs). Some, like geological formations, metamorphose over time. In his 1968 edition, Lipton listed “a conglomerate of geologists”; by 1991 it had become “a stratum of geologists.” He also includes:

• A nucleus of physicists
  
• A colloid of chemists
  
• A family of biologists
  
• A colony of bacteriologists
  
• A pullulation of microbiologists
  

• A (continental) drift of geophysicists
  
• A loam of soil scientists
  
• A wave of oceanographers
  
• A bog of wetland biologists
  
• A fault of seismologists

Retta Whinnery  

RETURN to non-frame version of Blueline.