A quabble of tweets, and other collective nouns for the web
The English language is full of great collective nouns.
A murder of crows is a classic. Then there’s a parliament of owls, an unkindness of ravens, a down of hares, a clowder of cats.
But there aren’t many for the web. That’s changing thanks to Collective Nouns for the Web (organised by Melanie Sumner).
There aren’t many yet but I like these three:
- A vanity is ten or more domains owned by a single person, where very few are in use.
- A parade of RSS feeds is when you have so many RSS feeds that you have to scroll to see them all.
- A quabble of Tweets is the responses or quote tweets that spawn from an especially hot/unpleasant take.
You can suggest new collective nouns by filling an issue on GitHub.
My partner and I have started trialling a few. Here’s what we’ve come up with:
- a clout of influencers
- a tempest of reply guys
- a snit of stans
- a trantrum of incels
- a classified of spam bots
- a borer of crypto boosters
I’ll be thinking about this for a while.
Published on • Whisper any comments into a leaf and let it float away on a breeze
Future enemies
Subscribe to the ... enemies newsletter so you never miss a nemesis.
I mean, it’s not like you're going to remember to come back here on your own. URLs are hard.