A Chain of Bobolinks

My nephew asked me to help him with some forms of collective nouns as part of his assignment and because I was not very familiar with most of them, I turned to the net for some help. Typing the words “collective nouns” on the yahoo search bar, I got 615,000 results returned in 1.11s on my topic of interest. I felt like I was opening a whole new world to “a wealth of information” as I browsed through the long list of creative collective nouns available now for writers to use to color up their sentences. Suddenly the common collective nouns I know and use like --- a bouquet of flowers, a galaxy of stars, a choir of angels, a flight of stairs, a network of computers, a flock of seagulls --- became borrriiing.

My word bank now contains my new favorite collective nouns:

An illusion of magicians
An indecision of managers
An impatience if wives
A giggle of girls
A bond of British secret agents
A mass of Catholics
A run of cowards
A knuckle of gangsters
A solution of chemists
A scoop of journalists
A breakdown of plans
A linkage of webmasters
A yearning of yesterdays
A promise of tomorrow
A twinkling of todays

And my most favorite of all
A chain of bobolinks

Bobolinks are North American birds, but “a chain of bobolinks” sounds derogatorily funny if you speak Tagalog. The phrase almost sounds like an insult, doesn’t it? (giggle, giggle…)

Imagine if the lyrics of the Pocahontas’ theme song Colors of the Wind were written using collective nouns?

The rainstorm and the river are my brothers

And a siege of herons and a bevy of otters are my friends

And we are all connected to each other

In a circle in a hoop that never ends

Have you ever heard a pack of wolves cry to the blue corn moon?

Or let a convocation of eagles tell you where they’ve been

Can you sing with all the voices of a range of mountains

Can you paint with all the colors of a break of winds

Can you paint with all the colors of a break of winds

It sucks, alright. Aside from violating the standard count and phrasing of a song, Vanessa Williams will gasp for air singing these lines. Simply silly ... like “a flush of toilets”.