And like most jargon, they were ripe for parody.Įnter The Book of Saint Albans in 1486. Terms of venery were the linguistic equivalent of silly hats: colorful, affected, fashionable, and very popular. A lady could come across a murmuration of starlings or a bellow of bullfinches on her morning ride. A brave gentleman might hunt a pride of lions while a slightly less brave one might target a confusion of guinea fowl. If you hunt them, it is other.”Īrthur Conan Doyle, Sir Nigel: A Novel of the Hundred Years’ War Terms Of VeneryĬourtly hunting in France and England was all the rage in the 14th and 15th centuries, with its own specialized vocabulary known as “terms of venery” (venery is an archaic word for hunting). “Nay, nay, lad, it is indeed sad to see how little you know… No man of gentle birth would speak of a herd of swine that is the peasant speech. Animals rarely featured in the daily lives of the well-to-do, except when it came to hunting. The aristocrats during that time hardly knew what cows, pigs and sheep were, but were well acquainted with boeuf, porc and mouton. This is why we English speakers have different words for living animals and their culinary equivalents. The conquerors brought their culture, their customs and their language. In the centuries that followed the Norman invasion of 1066, the ruling class of England was French. You would see Norse patterns, Saxon motifs, and, running through everything, the delicate threads of Anglo-Norman - a dialect of Old French. If languages were carpets, English would be a vast, cobbled-together patchwork. Have you ever wondered why fish swim in schools, stairs are measured in flights or worms come in cans? As with so many things in life, the French are to blame. And there is that fun quirk of the English language known as collective nouns. Or those wacky silent letters like in knife and benign. Words that look the same but don’t sound the same (like cough and through). We’re all familiar with the odd characteristics of the English language.
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