In a language like English (and most European languages) where expressing plural is obligatory, it is not surprising that there are special words to group thingsto make all those plurals a bit more manageable. Group classifiersor in English what we often call 'collective nouns'make many entities into one group. With them we can treat a plural subset as singular. So we have 'a flock of birds', 'a herd of cattle', 'a gaggle of geese', 'a fleet of ships', 'a gang of thieves' and so on. For animals and birds, English is particularly rich with ancient terms for groups. We don't get much opportunity to use them, more's the pity, but they are good for Trivial Pursuit or crossword questions: 'what do you call a group of larks?' (The answer is 'an exaltation'). And people have fun making them up. (What do you call a group of lawyers? An answer might be 'a pack', like 'a pack of wolves'.)

Jennifer Lindsay*