A superfluity of Substacks

I know you’re all busy people, with jobs and children and partners and dentist appointments to think about, but how often do you stop to consider terms of venery?

That’s right, not as often as you should. I know this because when I asked people (specifically, my friend Tracy), she raised her eyebrows at me in a very “SAY WHAT NOW?” kind of way. I’m guessing this is because venery is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as the pursuit of indulgence in sexual pleasure, and we all know what sometimes happens in the aftermath of such indulgences. But get your mind out of the gutter, because I’m referring to the second definition of venery, which is the art, act, or practice of hunting. Yep, the venison you might have ordered at a destination restaurant is just a fancy word for deer, derived from the Latin venari, to hunt.

In medieval times, noblemen invented their own jargon for a grouping of animals: a swarm of bees, a pride of lions, a murmuration of starlings, a skulk of foxes, a murder of crows, a shrewdness of apes. No one knows when these terms were originally codified, but they’re believed to have made their first recorded appearance in 1486 in The Book of Saint Albans, which details gentlemanly pursuits such as hawking, hunting, and heraldry. I would like to call your attention to two items about The Book of Saint Albans: its authorship is traditionally attributed to Dame Juliana Berners, a 15th century prioress, and the Wikipedia entry showing a photograph of the book (currently located in the Cambridge University Library) notes that there is an “obscene drawing in pencil added below text.” The obscene drawing is of unknown provenance, as far as I can tell. Both those items make me inexpressibly happy.

I went down this delightful and absolutely unnecessary rabbit hole because I recently stumbled on a book a student gave me years ago called An Exaltation of Larks.

The subtitle of An Exaltation of Larks is The Venereal Game, because the author, James Lipton, wants to share existing terms of venery as well as to invite you, the reader, to come up with your own. To get us started, he gives us a Persistence of Parents and an Ingratitude of Children, an Unction (or Extreme Unction) of Undertakers, a Hive of Allergists, and a Transplant of Suburbanites.

My edition of The Exaltation of Larks was published pre-internet, a dark time when going down rabbit holes was far more labor intensive and time consuming than it is now. We all know that the internet has caused chaos and pandemonium significant changes in the social fabric, but on the plus side, the internet directed me to Penguins International, where I discovered that there are no fewer than five (maybe more) terms for a group of penguins, including Raft (on water), Waddle (on land), Colony or Rookery (large breeding groups), and Crèche (a group of chicks that band together for safety when their parents hunt).

Speaking of penguins, you probably remember Alfred Date, Australia’s oldest living man who, at age 109, knit tiny sweaters for injured penguins. I would call that a bundle of benevolence, or maybe a skein of sweetness.

The one problem with the venereal game is that once you start thinking of names for collective nouns, it’s hard to stop. So far I’ve come up with “a distraction of cell phones,” “a futility of anti-aging creams,” “a disappointment of Mallomars,” and “an obstruction of seniors” (in reference to the large group of senior citizens who take over all the TINY tables at my favorite coffee place by pushing them together into a large amoeba-like shape which is clearly NOT HOW THE TINY TABLES ARE MEANT TO BE USED).

In conclusion, we should all be spending more time thinking about terms of venery. Please share yours in the comments!

Only 15 days before my second book, Troika, hits the bookshelves! If you haven’t preordered your copy, one click will take you to every conceivable purchasing option! If you’ve already preordered, thank you! If you haven’t, you should! Or tell your library to order it! Or annoy all your friends and tell them to order it! Apologies for this extravagance of exclamation marks!

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