A FEW years back, I took my daughter to Longleat Safari Park for her birthday. One moment I remember was the viewing tower where you could feed the giraffes.

Having been stiffed for a couple of leaves of limp lettuce, my daughter decided she was too scared and I ended up feeding the giraffe myself, everyone going ‘ewww’ as its long dark blue tongue slobbered out for its salad.

I was chatting about giraffes this week, as one does, when the question inevitably came up (or at least inevitably if you’re talking to someone like me) as to what the collective noun is for a group of such creatures.

After a few comedy guesses, it turned out that the English language had gone one better and plumped to describe a collection of giraffes as a tower.

I’ve always wondered, but never actually bothered to find out, where all these obstinacies of buffaloes and basks of crocodiles come from.

It turns out their origins lie in the Middle Ages, and a collection of publications known as Books of Courtesy. These were guides written for young noblemen so they don’t make a fool of themselves in court.

One of the most influential was The Book of St Albans, written with one of those nice literary echoes, by Dame Juliana Barnes in 1486. This was a guide to hunting, hawking and heraldry and included a list of 164 collective nouns.

Some of these were hunting terms already in use. But others, as I far as I can see, were simply made up for poetic or comic effect.

A misbelief of painters, for example, came from the way court artists made so sure that the nobles they were sketching looked good. A goring of butchers apparently came from the Old English gor, meaning (I hope you’re not eating) dirty or filthy.

Rather than staying in regular usage, many of these medieval terms simply died away, only to be more recently repurposed or newly invented.

According to Google’s Ngram Viewer, a search engine that tracks the age of words and phrases, one of the most famous collective nouns, a murder of crows, only really came into prominence in the 1990s: a flock of crows, rather, was the regular term for centuries.

A pride of lions, similarly, has only achieved prominence since the late 1930s. As for my tower of giraffes, rather than being a historic term, it was only invented around 1970, and only really rocketed into usage after 2000.

Speaking of collective nouns (and verbs and adjectives), it turns out this is the 250th of these Word Up articles. I wonder what the collective noun for columns is? (Polite) answers on a postcard please!

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