now you clap your hands
we making our dub
we want you to be involved
you hold down the riddim
while i mash down this schism
I love nomenclature like this. A “drift” of quail. A “siege” of herons. A “charm” of goldfinches. A “murder” of crows.
It all points to a time when people had a different connection with place, a complex knowledge of and taxonomy for describing flora and fauna.
For a great dictionary of these kinds of terms, not for birds but for general terrain, check Home Ground edited by Barry Lopez.
The following is taken from Wikipedia:
The standard collective noun for a group of birds of any type is a flock.[1]
For a number of individual birds, there exist collective nouns particular to the type of bird. Many of these collective nouns are fanciful and not in common use in English. The book A Mess of Iguanas… A Whoop of Gorillas by Alon Shulman is a good reference for the collective nouns and their etymology. James Lipton’s book An Exaltation of Larks is devoted to these collective nouns, many of which originated as hunters’ terms and have been in the language for centuries.
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If you’re just sitting there in the front seat that’s suspicious.
The trick is to use your cellphone. An innocent prop that’s easily visible to passersby on the streets outside of the vehicle. A cellphone with a 3.7 inch AMOLED display and 24-bit color, angled to reflect conspicuously through the driver’s window, is a tool to transform you from threat to non-threat.
With a cellphone in your hand, you’re just some guy checking a map, email, or text message. Whatever. Just checking something before you go home for the night.
— From "How to live in a Winnebago in the richest neighborhoods of DC"i love how when you talk to the paisanos they don’t ever ask you like where you’re from.
it’s all just about whatever’s happening right here.
this guy, adrian, was like ‘lindo dia no?‘
and he showed me where there’s a little pozito of agua that’s pure and comes straight up out of the aquifer. you can see the little streaks of sulfur in the water.
and he invited me to go up there with him to explore the monte, al caballo. [to the mountain, by horse]
he said come on over early some sunday morning, come early and we’ll go up there together.
and it’s all just like that, everything’s just like right about the day and what can happen downstream.
and while we were sitting there, a little bit of the waterfall blew, like the wind changed direction and the water sprinkled down over us and he said that the waterfall did that when it was getting jealous.
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I’ve seen a lot of people go into marketing — or help companies who want to be ‘cool.’ What artists do now is help brands build an identity. They end up styling or set decorating. That’s where we’re at now.”
— Donnelly, co-editor of the Los Angeles literary magazine Slake, on where "creatives" end up working