I describe my writing space on Substack as my diary of all the things I love to think about, all the stuff that makes me feel alive, and when I first wrote the About page I listed out ‘a few of my favourite things’:
the language-related rabbit holes I dive into through my work
the objects and insights I discover when I’m gardening or on a walk
my cultural highlights
Well, a recent trip to Istanbul has reminded me that there’s something I missed off the list:
cats!
There are many, many cats wandering the streets of the city. Mostly roaming or lolling around, owned by nobody, loving life. While I was having a cooling drink (a homemade basil sherbet no less) in a café in Kadıköy, I watched one cat opposite the street absolutely living its best life. Snoozing on the top step of a house that was being renovated, eventually waking up for a sip of water from a bowl three steps down, then up to the second step for a snack, then right back up to the top step for another snooze, this time facing the other way around. What a life.
The trip was the first time I’ve ever thought to look up the collective noun for a group of cats – I guess in the UK we mostly see just one or two at a time – and it’s a clowder (like cluster perhaps?) or, alternatively, a glaring of cats.
According to Oxford Dictionaries though, the collective nouns we know now (for all sorts of groups of animals and things) arose from “15th-century lists of 'proper terms', notably that in the Book of St Albans attributed to Dame Juliana Barnes (1486). Many of these are fanciful or humorous terms which probably never had any real currency, but have been taken up by antiquarian writers, notably Joseph Strutt in Sports and Pastimes of England (1801)”1. That means there’s scope to rewrite them I reckon – any suggestions that can top clowder or glaring? Or, for the dog lovers out there, surely we can do better than pack or kennel?
https://web.archive.org/web/20121012112007/http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/what-do-you-call-a-group-of