Okay, what’s the collective word for three or more larks? 

If you answered an exaltation, you are to be either scorned as a trivia tragic or pitied as the victim of what I’m beginning to suspect is a gigantic leg-pull.

I mean, have you ever actually heard anyone exclaim:  Look at all those owls!  I reckon there must be a whole parliament of them!!

And have you once heard David Attenborough say anything to the effect of:  ‘I’m standing in the middle of this bloat of hippopotamuses, or this shrewdness of apes, or this crash of rhinos, and it’s absolutely marvellous!’

I say the whole business (allegedly one of the collective nouns for ferrets, the other being fesnying) should have stopped with prides of lions and gaggles of geese, the only such terms acknowledged in standard dictionaries.    

I want to know what sniggering prankster started it.  Who SAYS crows come in murders and unicorns in blessings?  Whoever they are, they’ve overplayed their hand by asking us to swallow a flink of cows when we already had the perfectly serviceable herd.

Flink is the one that made me smell a rat.  A whole ravening of rats, in fact.  Not bad, eh?  Anyone can play this game:  A corruption of cricketers.  A grizzle of greenies.  A worry of One Nation supporters.  A latte of lefties.

Next time some dupe of the collective noun conspiracy asks what you call three or more ravens or whatever, remember, the correct answer is:  a lot.